You know that humans came from apes. That was easy to figure out.  But, now, where does account planning come from? Should be easy, too: in the late 1960s, BMP and JWT were the first agencies to employ strategic researchers as equal partners to account management and creatives in order to make advertisements relevant and effective with consumers. From these two pioneering agencies the innovation spread to the rest of the advertising world in the U.K. and from the U.K. (like so many other things) it came to the U.S. Blah-blah-blah. That’s it, this post is over.

Not so fast. The other day, Democratic Underground and Cubemate broke out the news of a discovery of an interesting historical document that gives planning a slightly longer and darker pedigree. The document instantly gave away the first forensic clue: the word “rumors” is spelled in an American, not British way. The document originated from the declassified archives, is dated June 2, 1943, and represents a memo from Psychological Warfare Staff to the Office of Strategic Services Planning Group.

The Planning Group reporting to the Joint Chiefs of Staff was responsible with “collecting intelligence,” conducting “research and analysis,” “accumulating political, sociological, psychological, topographical and military information” about the “target,” organizing “guerrilla warfare” and, of course, spreading rumors or, as we now prefer to call it, WOM (note the militarized abbreviation style). It was supposed to make military operations more efficient by grounding them in the knowledge of the enemy. Sounds familiar, doesn’t? I remember once talking to a creative director, who directly compared the planning department to an intelligence unit within an ad agency. One creative brief for a planning blog referred to it as a “secret weapon.”

World War II paved the way for a more integrated world united by commercial interests, cultural exchanges and transnational brands. The end of the Vietnam War and, then, the Cold War brought about even more integration and global commercialization. Nevertheless, military innovations and aesthetics remain surprisingly fruitful (think of the Internet, fiber-optic cables, Volkswagen IT and its imitation Honda Element and, now, planning) and the military slang is contagious (”strategy,” “tactics,” “chief…officer,” “targeting,” “guerrilla marketing,” “agency,” to name a few). With growing competition, technological complexity and services aggregation in the advertising world, we yearn for speed, power and efficiency befitting a nimble military unit.

At this point, my officemate Ilya editor woke me up and said: this is too sinister, the link between planning and military intelligence isn’t proven, we need more insights into the history of military intelligence, and we need more specific implications for advertising and the media. And I thought those were brilliant comments.

The fascinating aspect of the planning/intel similarity is that it stems not from historical contingency (iPod is white because it was designed by a designer who used to design bathrooms – apocryphal) but from structural resemblance: in similar situations people tend to invent similar tools to reach similar goals.

Another delightful fact is that military intel is a relatively recent phenomenon. The army began to systematically monitor its enemies only during World War I, which is, what, 100 years ago. Barely. The very need to “know” the target in order to strike it more successfully slowly emerged in the 19th century as a result of the confrontation between Western military forces and the highly mobile and well-adapted tribal groups in North America and South Africa. They just didn’t behave in a manner familiar to army generals. This early “planning” involved attracting bands of scouts from hostile tribes (read: “brand enthusiasts” or “influencers”) and using them as sources of information about the customs and habits of their more stubborn brethren and as out-of-home “media channels” to track them down. In those days, “if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead” had a fully embodied meaning. 

As the 20th century went by, military intel became more and more rarefied. Scouts were replaced by in-house professionals equipped with ever-evolving technologies to collect indirect but highly predictive knowledge about the enemy. But the principle, as outlined in the document under discussion, remained the same: “a successful rumor must take the advantage of the state of mind of the people for whom it is intended.“