Commentary

Free Agent: Connecting All the Dots

This is a first for me. I'm about to use this column not to pontificate (at least not only to pontificate) but to ask you, the readers, to weigh in on something for me: Is there a difference between channel planning and connection planning?

You probably won't be surprised to learn I have an opinion on this question: I don't think the two are interchangeable. But I suspect others believe they are, and that scares me.

This subject is a matter of some personal importance, as I led the pioneering of U.S. connection planning at Fallon back in 1999. When we conceived this discipline, we based it in cutting-edge media strategy work being done by breakaway specialty shops in the UK (New PhD, Motive and Unity among them), along with the accepted account-planning principles and some less proven approaches that we could only guess would be needed in the digital future.

The whole idea was to get to a deep understanding not only of consumers' media habits, but also of the moods, mindsets, and motivations behind them, so that brands and consumers could more powerfully connect. We loosely defined a set of practices and deliverables, and dubbed it "connection planning" in a deliberate attempt to allow this nascent discipline to become as wide-ranging and inclusive as it would need to be in the years ahead.

Fast-forward eight years and "channel planning" is now a popular term for upstream, consumer-centric media-strategy work. It comes up often in trade articles and is sold as a premium offering in agency credentials, to the point where it might be the fall-back label now. For instance, upon my recent announcement that I was starting my own communication-strategy consultancy, people called saying, "Oh, you're doing channel planning!" To which I could respond with only, "I am?"

I mean, what is channel planning anyway? I honestly do want to hear from people, especially those whose business cards proclaim this specialty, in case I have an outdated or simply incorrect idea of the discipline. I consider channel planning the more analytical, data-driven side of the connection coin; it seeks to assess and recommend various channel options, taking into consideration not only the individual contributions and drawbacks of each, but also the myriad ways in which they overlap and interconnect. This service is necessary and valuable, and likely to become even more so as response data begin to drive more investment decisions. But, in my mind at least, it's not enough on its own; it addresses only part of the entire connection job at hand. It doesn't capture the softer sciences that allow us to really get inside consumers' heads so that we can make intuitive creative leaps.

And there's the rub. I believe connection planning's role is to inform all communication decisions, including the message itself, not just those regarding investment and channel allocation. (In its breadth of scope, connection planning might be an interchangeable term with "communication planning," another popular label used more often by creative agencies.) At a time when fitting brands into people's lives is as difficult and risky as it is now, there has to be room for intuition and creativity in what we do. Otherwise, don't we fall into the same rut media has been stuck in for decades, expecting our solutions to come directly out of the numbers?

An example: Bud.tv. I know, others have criticized it enough already (no doubt a harsh slap in the face after the media love-fest before the channel launched), but it serves my point. Can't you just imagine the channel-focused argument put forth for investing a reported $30 million on this project? "Data say that our target audience has an appetite for quality video entertainment; the Internet is their preferred source; broadband allows us to have our own channel for a fraction of the cost we already invest in commercials; hey, let's put on a show!" Problem is, too much of the softer-yet-critical considerations were lost in execution, like, for instance, why Bud prospects not only love but also hate the Internet, and how they feel about, say, multi-layered registration processes and virtually unsharable video. Sadly for Bud, this was a classic case of the medium being the message, and the message was, "We don't get you."

In all fairness, I don't even know if Budweiser or its agency uses channel planning per se. But obviously Bud.tv was a result of someone's prioritizing where to communicate over precisely how. And that narrow perspective scares me - no matter what you call it.

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