Integrated Comm Planner

An integrated communications planner works out how a brand should talk to its audience across all channels at once — TV, social, out-of-home posters, search, influencers, PR, sponsorship — and how those pieces should fit together into one coherent campaign. They sit between the client's business problem and the creative and media teams, producing the thinking and the campaign framework that everyone else executes against. Most work in advertising, media or integrated creative agencies, serving brand clients; some work in-house in a brand's own marketing team.

Starting salary: £24k–£30k
Live graduate jobs: Search all jobs
Main way in: Agency graduate schemes at media agencies, advertising agencies…
They usually ask for: A degree in any subject

Approximate graduate salary

Typically around £24,000–£30,000 to start, though this varies widely by employer type and location — large London network agencies tend to sit at the higher end, smaller regional and independent agencies lower, and in-house brand roles vary in both directions.

What you'd actually do

Digging into a client brief to work out what the actual problem is — for example, whether a drop in sales is a brand awareness issue, a pricing issue or a distribution issue — and reframing it into something a campaign can address
Pulling together audience evidence from research tools, survey data, social listening and the client's own sales and CRM data to build a picture of who the campaign should talk to and what they currently think
Writing the communications plan or 'comms strategy' deck: the core idea, which channels do which job, in what order, and how success will be measured
Running or sitting in on workshops with creative teams, media planners and client-side marketers to pressure-test ideas and agree the channel mix

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Preparing and presenting slides in client meetings, then revising them after feedback (a large share of the job is building arguments in PowerPoint or Keynote)
Reviewing campaign performance after launch — looking at reach, engagement, brand tracking and sales data — and writing up what worked and what to change next time
Supporting new business pitches, which often means fast, intense bursts of research and deck-building to a tight deadline

How graduates get in

Agency graduate schemes at media agencies, advertising agencies and integrated communications agencies — the most common route. These often rotate you through strategy, media planning and account management before you specialise, and tend to recruit in autumn for the following summer.
Starting as a media planner, account executive or junior researcher and moving sideways into planning after a year or two. This is very common — many planners did not start with 'planner' in their title.
Industry entry programmes and apprenticeships run by advertising and media industry bodies, which are an increasingly normal alternative to a graduate scheme and are open to non-graduates too.
Direct application to junior strategy or 'planning assistant' roles advertised by individual agencies. These exist but are less predictable than schemes; smaller and independent agencies are more likely to hire this way.

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Moving in from a client-side marketing role, market research agency, or an insight team. Unusual straight out of university, but a normal route a few years in.
Internships and placements (including industry-run summer schemes) are an important feeder — many graduate hires have done one. A placement year on a marketing or business degree also helps a lot.

What employers ask for

A degree in any subject. Subject genuinely does not matter much — agencies hire from English, history, geography, psychology, anthropology, economics and marketing alike, and arts and humanities backgrounds are well represented. Marketing or advertising degrees help you speak the language but are not required.
Most employers ask for a 2:1, but a meaningful number of agencies have dropped degree-classification requirements entirely or use CV-blind and task-based assessment instead. This varies a lot by agency.
Evidence of interest in brands, culture and people — a blog, a student media role, a side project, a portfolio of campaign critiques. Agencies care more about this than about grades.
Some commercial numeracy. You will read data and build simple arguments from it, so being comfortable with spreadsheets and percentages matters even though this is not a quantitative job.

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No professional qualification is required to work as a planner. Some people later take industry qualifications (for example those offered by professional marketing and advertising bodies) but they are optional and usually employer-funded.
Work experience in an agency, a marketing team, student marketing societies or running campaigns for a society or small business is a strong differentiator for entry-level roles.

Skills that matter

Problem reframing

Clients often brief you on the symptom rather than the cause, and the value a planner adds is spotting that the real issue is something different from what was asked.

Writing clearly and tightly

A comms strategy lives or dies on whether the core idea can be expressed in a sentence that a creative team and a client both understand the same way.

Reading data without being a data analyst

You constantly pull numbers from audience research tools, brand trackers and campaign reports and have to judge what they actually support rather than over-claiming.

Channel literacy

You need a working grasp of what TV, paid social, search, out-of-home, influencer and PR each realistically do for a brand, because the whole job is deciding which does which job.

Presenting and defending an argument

Strategy only counts when a client buys it, so you will be standing up in rooms explaining why your recommendation is right and handling pushback live.

Cultural curiosity

Good planning depends on noticing shifts in how people behave, watch and buy before they show up in formal research.

Putting these on a CV? We counted which skills 12,914 live graduate adverts ask for, and what to do with the answer — part of our application advice.

Where it leads

Graduate or junior planner / strategy executive: supporting senior planners with research, deck-building and performance reporting, usually for around the first year or two.
Planner or strategist: owning the strategy for smaller clients or individual campaigns, writing briefs for creative teams and presenting directly to clients. Typically reached after a couple of years, though this varies by agency size — smaller shops push you forward faster.
Senior planner / strategy manager: running strategy across a larger account or group of accounts, leading pitch thinking, and starting to manage junior staff.
Strategy director or head of strategy / head of planning: setting the strategic approach across multiple clients, heavily involved in new business, and accountable for the agency's strategic reputation. Timelines to this point vary widely — some reach it in under a decade, others take considerably longer or move agencies to get there.
Common sideways moves: in-house brand strategy or marketing leadership at a client, consultancy, freelance strategy, or into broader agency leadership such as managing director. Some move towards data and effectiveness specialisms, others towards brand and creative strategy.

What people get wrong

“It's the creative job — you come up with the adverts.”

Planners write the brief that creatives respond to. You define the problem, the audience and the idea's strategic territory; copywriters and art directors produce the actual ads. Plenty of planners enjoy this more, but if you want to make the work itself, you want a creative role instead.

“'Integrated' just means 'put the campaign on lots of channels'.”

Integration is about giving each channel a distinct job that the others cannot do, and sequencing them. A planner who simply repeats the same message everywhere is doing the job badly — the skill is in deciding what social does that TV cannot, and what the store or website has to pick up afterwards.

“It's a glamorous, idea-generating role with little admin.”

A substantial amount of the week is building, re-building and reformatting presentation decks, chasing data, and sitting in internal review meetings. The thinking is the fun part but it is a minority of the hours, especially in the first couple of years.

“You need a marketing or advertising degree.”

Agencies recruit very widely by subject and often value humanities and social science backgrounds for the way they teach you to build an argument from mixed evidence. Demonstrated interest in brands and culture matters far more than what you studied.

Where this varies

The title covers quite different jobs depending on where you sit. In a media agency, 'comms planning' leans towards channel strategy and audience data — which channels, what budget split, what sequence — and is more numerical. In a creative or integrated agency, the same title leans towards brand and communications strategy, closer to writing creative briefs and defining what the brand should say. In-house at a brand, you are more likely to be coordinating external agencies and internal stakeholders than producing original strategy yourself. Agency size matters too: at a big network agency the role is narrow and specialised with strong training structures, while at a small independent you may cover strategy, media and client handling all at once with less formal support. Geographically, the largest concentration of these roles is in London, with meaningful clusters in Manchester, Leeds, Bristol, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Glasgow, but options outside the big cities are limited.

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General guidance about the role across the UK market, not about any specific employer. Entry routes and requirements vary — always check the individual job advert.