Fear and planning on the American campaign trail.

US agencies still have a lot to learn about planning's role

The sign at the entrance to the pools in Caesars Palace hotel, Las Vegas, reads: "European-style topless bathing is permitted only in the Venus Pool." This is rich. It is all but impossible to avoid topless Americans in Las Vegas. Thus I contemplated the significance of choosing Caesars Palace as the venue of the US Account Planning Group's conference this week, while sipping my yard of margarita by the pool.

Las Vegas means "the meadows", a reminder of when it was just a green dribble of oasis in the middle of a desert. Twenty years ago, when Hunter S Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, it was a village of 70,000 residents. Thompson said then that this odd little place was "the heart of the American Dream, the main story of our generation". Now it has more than two million residents. It is the fastest-growing city in the United States and one of the richest.

It was also 20 years ago that account planning sailed to these shores on the good ship Jane Newman, alighting at Chiat Day. Ten years ago, 30 planners gathered for the first US:APG conference. Today there are more than 2,000 account planners in American agencies, three times more than there are in the UK, and 650 of them had come to Las Vegas. But despite its rapid growth, European-style account planning is still, like topless bathing, a slightly un-American activity.

The theme of the conference was accountability. This was timely as the advertising recession has hit US agencies hard. One major West Coast shop had seven clients at the start of the year. This week it has two. Last year's conference attracted 1,000 delegates. This year, numbers were down by one-third, and many left early to get back to their desks.

But the conference chairs (Emma Cookson of Bartle Bogle Hegarty New York and David Hackworthy of TBWA\Chiat Day New York) said the timing was coincidence. Discussing the economic value of creativity had been the objective before the downturn. Cookson said: "Planning still means different things in different agencies. We wanted to give planners a practical toolkit to underscore the rigour of the discipline."

The US:APG Awards have also changed to reflect this new emphasis on accountability. "We need to demonstrate the business value of creative thinking in terms clients can identify with," Cathy Clift of Rapp Collins Worldwide, the chair of the judges, said. "We will raise the status of account planners in the US by introducing more focus on results."