• by Jack Feuer , August 8, 2007

Paul Woolmington looks like one of my favorite storytelling stereotypes, the eccentric, adventuring Brit. He's got that wild-haired, crazy-eyed Englishman thing going, like he's just returned from years on a remote mountaintop in Afghanistan, where he, Sean Connery and Michael Caine ruled a barbaric tribe, only Woolmington didn't get killed and he wears nice suits.

Our first meeting, if I'm not mistaken, was about eight years ago in a nondescript Manhattan eatery, not what you'd call a really dramatic setting. I had recently been installed as Adweek's first media editor, and Woolmington was running Media Kitchen.

But then he opened his mouth -- and I was off on an adventure, albeit of a totally different kind.

It was like turning on a trope spigot. Media ideas, concepts, schemes, all burst forth from that fervid brain, each one more fascinating than the next. Although he didn't use the term back then, he was preaching the communications-planning gospel.

It was like taking a time machine back to the 1980s, when account planning also migrated across the Atlantic, and all hell broke loose. Account planners overran agencies with their great accents and cool British names and, not infrequently, really provocative ideas.

They were easy to parody, since nobody knew what the hell they were talking about half the time. But I loved them. They brought real, old-fashioned imagination to advertising. I don't mean a clever way with words or dumbass devotion to what barely pubescent consumers think, do, eat and feel.

I mean real, old-fashioned, ancient-world, pre-digital ideas.

Ideas that no doubt won Woolmington and his Naked buddies (also Brits, although M.T. Carney, I believe, is technically a Scot) a tasty slice of Johnson & Johnson business. They're opening U.S. offices outside of their Least Coast outpost. They'll probably go on a new-business tear now. And expect a flurry of communication-planning boutiques with really cool names, staffed by folks with great accents, opening all over the country in the near future.

In other words, communications planning is replicating the account-planning life cycle in the U.S., step-by-step. In media, too, thinkers, not buyers, can split from big shops, start little consultancies, win big accounts and who knows, maybe even take over a tribe in Afghanistan.

This is a milestone. A sign of maturity for an unbundled business that is, in this country, not even two decades old.

Oh, and one more thing. Why don't the holding companies scour the world and purchase every English media professional they can find and give every media account to them and be done with it? They're smarter than us. Get over it. Make money from it. Buy a Brit. Now, that's what I call a plan.