COMMENT: Clarity on the future of planning will help resolve our crisis

But now, faced with tight economic times and more restricted hiring, we stand at a crossroads.

Are planners really business strategists? Brand consultants? (Excellent, say the MDs, we can charge them more expensively) Are planners really glorified researchers? (Good, say some clients, because we know nothing about China) Are they people who really understand about communication or are they just a luxury (sob) that we can't afford? Clients won't pay extra for planning, so let's just let the account service people write the briefs and move on.

This is a matter for serious thought. At a practical level, should MDs be hiring planners or firing planners? And if so, who? Qualitative researchers or MBA graduates? Ex-suits or ex-creatives? And how many? One poor soul, who rushes from client to client, skimming them all, or a planner for each account person, as exists in some US and UK firms.

Should planning be done by planners, or can it be done (as many would say it always has been) by gifted creatives and account people. Clarity on the future of planning would help these decisions greatly.

More importantly, the credibility and added value of planning thinking (whoever it is done by) is central to resolving the crisis in our industry as a whole. What will we be experts in? And what will it take in staffing, training and investment for clients to value that expertise?

Stanley Pollitt, who founded planning in the late 1960s, had a very clear vision. In his mind, planning existed to ensure that creative work was effective by:

- Bringing the discipline of research (through a trained researcher who understood advertising) to agencies. If a piece of creative work wasn't good enough to get through pre-testing, it wasn't good enough to run.

- Making sure that the "recent vast increase in information

(in 1969) was duly considered vs scanned and ignored.

- Acting as the conscience for the agency against "one's permanent temptation to be expedient".

A stern vision, and one that required a planner for every account person - but it's a vision that produced both client results and creative excellence.

Thirty years on, everybody has his or her own definition of planning.

The brief writer; the creative midwife; the brand custodian. Some roles stress effectiveness, others stress creativity. But surely the underlying need has not changed.

The simple fact is that we need a substantial part of our human capital devoted not just to developing executions, or to servicing the client, but to thinking deeply about whether the advertising is right.

John Woodward is Leo Burnett's director of planning, Asean and Greater China, and is a co-founder of the Asia Account Planning Group.