Underappreciated, until you need them. Well guess what, ad agencies? YOU NEED THEM.

In April of 1996, Jon Steel, head of planning at Goodby Silverstein and the progenitor of the planning discipline in the US, wrote a piece in Adweek about the importance of account people in creative agencies that was titled, “Underappreciated, until you need them.”

It was a pretty seminal read for me at the time, as I was finding my way at the OTHER great independent west coast creative shop, Wieden & Kennedy, and trying to work out how to do that as a “suit” (one of the many terms of affection for account people – thank you for defining me by what I wear, flip flop).

Seminal because in it, Steel wrote, “The best account people are also the best advertising people, and their greatest value comes not from their performance against a narrow job description, but from their contribution to the process as a whole.”

And I was like, “You get me.”

He went on to say, “We (planners and account people) take joint responsibility for both the advertising strategy and the quality of the creative work that emerges, and while we bring different craft skills to the process, we share jointly in almost every part of the process.”

And I was like, “Umm, hells yeah.”

To the point of co-owning the strategy, in my very first performance review at W&K by someone who shall remain nameless, I’d been told that the only thing I needed to work on was to “be more strategic,” but when I asked what that meant or how I could learn, I was given no guidance at all, and left to my own devices. But I’ll come back to that.

The article was also seminal because the perception at the time – at many U.S. creative agencies and with many “creative” people – was that suits needed to stay out of the creative process. That they were supposed to understand the client’s business, but that knowledge wasn’t critical to the development of the creative work, and didn’t really impact what the creative would look, sound or feel like. That they – sorry, we – were supposed to make sure the meeting went well, to ensure that we had portfolio cases ready to put the work in before carrying it to the presentation (often without seeing the work in advance of the meeting), to guarantee there would be no AV fuck-ups, and to make sure the clients were happy and smiling and ready to nod their heads affirmatively to anything that was put in front of them. In retrospect, in perception anyway, it was a very Mad Men-esque approach.

But the reality was very different, at least at W&K.

Although I had my share of last-minute scrambles to find a big enough portfolio case that had been hidden somewhere behind some other account person’s office door for their meeting with their client, and I had my share of presentations in which I hadn’t seen the work I was then asked and expected to defend, that was more the exception than the rule.

So even though the experience Steel described wasn’t my personal experience, I still found comfort and confidence in his words – they boosted me up and helped me to lean into my role even more, increasing my desire to “share jointly in almost every part of the process.”

And why wouldn’t I want to? Although I never touched the Nike account while I was there (I was one of the “crazy people working on non-Nike accounts” – as I wrote about in the article “I have someone to thank.”), I LOVED being part of the advertising process, every single step of it. I loved developing the kind of relationships with clients that allowed them to trust and believe that the agency would help solve their biggest and smallest problems, that we believed in what they were doing, making and selling, and we were all in to do whatever it took to create their brand and grow their business. I loved it when they trusted us to do that, because it made me feel as though I’d done my job.

I loved working with creatives, along with other account people on the team and planners on strategy (when the discipline was integrated into W&K and accepted broadly – and once I learned what it meant, of course), loved using my own knowledge of the client’s business and the category to inform the strategy and the work to make it sharper and more bullet-proof. And I loved seeing creatives present their work, loved the way problems were solved in the most unexpected and lateral ways, loved when briefs weren't “nailed” but instead “confounded,” loved being in a situation where I was invited to respectfully make comments on their baby (every account person learns that the hard way – doing it the first time SUCKS), and I loved hearing comments taken just as respectfully as I’d offered them. To this day, when I see a great idea, I STILL get goosebumps. I’ve learned over the years to trust the goosebumps.

And I also loved the production process – loved going on print/TV shoots, loved going on press checks, loved going to radio recording sessions, loved being asked to join for a commercial edit session – I learned something every time I went, and understanding what went into the making of the work made me better at my job.

In the article, Steel added, “The problem for many of the best account people is that the better they are at their job, the less likely others in the agency are to notice them. They are like milk and toilet paper. For most of our lives, we don’t give them a thought. Until one day they are not there when we need them.”

I remember reading that and again thinking that’s not really MY experience – the creative people I was working with all seemed to welcome and appreciate (even seek out) my involvement. And the accounts I was working on – from Dan and Dave’s “pet” account the State of Oregon Tourism business to ESPN to Coca-Cola to MGD and Miller High Life – were producing work that was regarded as some of the best work the agency had ever done (which was validated when W&K was named Campaign Magazine’s Agency of the Decade for the 90s, and in the article, images were selected from 10 campaigns that defined the agency over that 10-year span – of those, 5 were Nike so I had no connection to them, but of the other five, four of them were from accounts that I’d led - pretty proud moment for me).

My "What the...?" moment.

I was pretty shocked when, a few years later, at an agency that proudly proclaimed “The Work Comes First,” in a performance review (given by that same nameless person), I was told “You need to merchandise yourself more to senior management.”

Mouth agape, I remember stammering out, “I don’t even know what that means. Does the work not speak for itself? Is the expectation really that I have to go tell Dan and Dave and Jim and Susan how great I am?” Hearing the words as I said them, my reviewer sortof backpedaled, but the damage had been done, the tide had clearly turned, and the seeds had been sown for my departure.

So when a former client called just a few weeks later saying he wanted me to join him in Amsterdam to be one of his Global Advertising Managers at adidas, I jumped at the chance, gave my notice, and didn’t look back. I’m quite proud of the fact that in addition to him, one of my other favorite clients from those years subsequently hired me to lead his marketing efforts – I think that speaks well of the importance of account management in building those relationships, and the quality and effectiveness of the work we were able to create together.

As I left the agency for Amsterdam, Jon Steel’s final words rang in my head, “Perhaps the answer for unappreciated account people is to go away for a while, so that we are made aware of what life is like without them. But of course they know how useless we’d all be without them, and they are far too responsible to let that happen.”

To that I was like, “Yeah, well, you got the last part wrong, Jonny boy.”

But as I look at the world of advertising now, after being “away for a while” as both a client and a consultant for the last 10 years, I think there’s never been a more important time for great account people, and never a time when the skills of the “best advertising people” were more important – to agencies, and, frankly, to clients.

In his piece, Steel says, “the stronger the creative product, the stronger account management needs to be,” which I totally buy, but would actually tweak it slightly to say “If you want a strong creative product you must have strong account management.” The point is the same, but the primacy is different.

Agencies - and clients - are faced with never-before-seen challenges.

As everyone who works in an agency today knows, agencies are getting their lunch eaten from all sides – not just by other traditional agencies looking to protect their revenue and their people and willing to do just about anything to survive, but also by consulting firms, PR agencies, in-house agencies, and small specialist shops who carve away pieces of the brand one at a time, leaving the agency with just the crumbs of what it started with.

And at the same time, clients’ roles have become far more complex, and they’re expected to not only have an intimate understanding of every single new platform and channel into which the brand can insert its message, but also the ability to immediately wrangle and re-direct all their efforts when one platform or channel isn’t working, as well as a deep knowledge of the technology stack, supply chain, global consumer perceptions, utilization of big data, etc., etc.

All of which means that the role of the account person to be the client’s partner (and the creative's champion) has become more important than ever. Call it what you will – sounding board, objective counsel who can provide valuable perspective, a shoulder to lean on or an ear to listen, an able-bodied supporter, someone who can get shit done when everything can seem so complicated and difficult in a client organization – the account person can and should be the client’s first call every morning and last call every night.

So what can agencies do both to better protect current agency/client relationships, and deepen those relationships that exist in order to open up new access points (and new revenue streams)? A few thoughts from my own experience...

• Agencies need to inspire their account people creatively so that they feel ownership of the creative product – when an award is won, for example, if the agency buys an award for the creatives, then fork over the bucks for the account person as well. The image to the right is a card we attached to portfolio cases and gave to every account manager at Publicis to demonstrate that their role was much more than just carrying the case.
• Agencies need to hire for personality and soft skills as much as they do (or maybe more than they do) for specific experience and hard skills. Hard skills can almost always be taught, while the soft skills of assimilation, empathy, and building trust are innate, and either you got ’em or you don't. “You have car experience? You've led data-driven social media campaigns? That's great. Tell me about the last time you had to share bad news with a client and they wound up feeling better about the agency afterwards.”
• Agencies need to get out of the mode of expecting account managers to be project managers – those are distinctly different functions that require distinctly different skill sets and training. There is room for a hybrid, for sure - and that may well be the future - but that requires a special individual with the requisite skills for both aspects of the role.
• Agencies need to educate their account people on how to “be more strategic” instead of letting them figure it out for themselves. And if you don’t have anyone on staff who can do it, then bring someone in from the outside to help.
• Agencies need to understand how critical it is for account people to build deep and personal relationships with their clients, which sometimes means attending industry conferences with their clients instead of being chained to a desk.
• Agencies need to allow their account people the time and latitude to immerse themselves in their client’s business instead of assigning them to more accounts than one person can reasonably be expected to manage.
• Agencies need to rely on experience - both to handle important accounts (and let's face it, aren't they all important?) and also to teach those coming up about how to get the best out of the agency and the client.
• And agencies shouldn't ever ever ever tell their account people that they need to merchandise themselves more to the agency’s senior management – I can tell you from personal experience that the dissonance it created between what the agency said and how the agency behaved made it as demoralizing a comment as any I’ve ever received in my career.

Now I’m not suggesting doing these things will be an overnight panaceaic silver bullet, and I know the challenges in agency client relationships run deep, as enumerated in this article and this one and so many more. But if what agencies have given up is their lead strategic role, manifest most directly by losing senior account people who build the relationships with their clients, could that not be the piece that, put back into the Jenga game, props it back up again?

Going back to one point Jon Steel made, the true value of account people comes “from their contribution to the process as a whole.” If agencies want that, really want it, they must put a premium on account management, which means they need to recognize it, support it, nurture it, and value it as the critical function that it is.

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