Knowing how agencies and client businesses work is vital to making account planning pay-off and Smith & Company principals have first-hand experience in this regard, having worked with a number of US and British ad agencies in a client/vendor relationship; and, from working inside an agency. Sue Smith worked as a planning director for Goodby, Silverstein & Partners for over five years, with accounts such as Anheuser-Busch, the California Milk Processors Board, and American Isuzu Motors, to name a few.

We believe in employing a creative approach to account planning, using whatever it takes to gain actionable customer insights. We do not believe that focus groups are the best answer to every problem. We do whatever is likely to yield the best result to include person-on-the-street interviews, ethnographic studies, or quantitative surveys.

In addition to providing account planning expertise to agencies and their clients, we have also worked as lead planners for agencies embarking on client pitches and have, in fact, operated as the ‘planning department’ for some agencies with no planning resource or for those with stretched resources. In these instances, first-hand experience from working inside a creative agency has proved invaluable.