A Case for the Renaissance of Account Management

The global recession is eating away at our clients' budgets. The agency business model is weak at the knees. New media becomes old media overnight, leaving many of us behind. Clumsy attempts at onboarding technological expertise have left once-great agencies reeling. And margins? Remember margins?


More than ever before, the advertising industry needs entrepreneurs. We need people who can find daylight in all this muck. More than ever before, we need visionary, action-oriented leaders.


It is finally a great time to be in account management.


Almost sounds like a joke, doesn't it? For the past 60 years, we account folks have been portrayed as the credit-card-carriers for the creative guys. (Consider Pete Campbell vs. Don Draper.) Planners came along, and we moved down another notch. The geeks came in and became instant heroes. Even media became cool.


But it turns out that the modern account executive is ideally positioned for the new world. Why? Because we are not specialists. We are, in Malcom Gladwell-speak, T-shaped entrepreneurs with a deep understanding of account management and a broad knowledge of all the related disciplines.


At our best we are:


Dynamic thinkers who understand the broader view of our client's business.
Orchestrators who know how business works and how to marshal resources and talent.
Inspiring leaders who are willing to take intelligent risks, explore new financial models and build new management systems.
Relationship builders who work day in, day out with our clients, proving that we can be reliable, objective partners to CMOs and creative directors alike.
True believers who know there is genius both in conceiving great ideas and in bringing them to life.
Creative brand managers and generalists who don't start with assumptions about hard sell or soft sell, TV or digital, mobile or social.
Our industry is desperate for a new generation of entrepreneurial account people. Our agencies need it, our clients want it and creative people are crying out for it.


Any agency worth its salt is encouraging account executives to speak up, not just to be in the discussion but also to lead it. Even when they're at their most insecure -- especially when they're at their most insecure -- creative leaders don't want yes men as partners, they want opinionated thought leaders. Our clients don't want old fashioned "mad men," they want men and women who get mad when good ideas die for bad reasons or when the ideas just aren't good enough.


Nothing excites great account leaders like great ideas -- their own or someone else's. If great creative leaders like starting jobs, great account leaders like bringing them to triumphant conclusions.


Even though account executives are typically depicted as the industry's Willy Lomans, there's no shortage of inspiring role models for today's upstarts. Jay Chiat, Pat Fallon, Carl Ally, Shelly Lazarus, Charlotte Beers and my agency's John Adams were account executives who never played second fiddle to anyone. They made things happen. They were MVPs. If they proved their value over the past few decades, think how much more valuable their leadership would be or is today. (Attention will be, must be paid.)


For years the industry has done its damnedest to make account management an unattractive career option. CDs and strategists have been lionized. Techies have been welcomed with open arms and opened pocketbooks. The awards are given to everyone else. While others went to Cannes, we went to the distributor conferences.


But look at us now. We quit the Lucky Strikes back in the '80s. We put down the Dewar's years ago. As far as we're concerned, someone else can pick up the tab at Shutters.


We've got work to do.


http://adage.com/article/agency-viewpoint/a-case-renaissance-account-management/233959/


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Mumford is a twenty-year account management veteran, holds an MBA from The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern. He currently serves as SVP Group Managing Director at The Martin Agency.

The Dinosaur Agency & the Ice Age

There has been much said about how specialization and splitting up into micro-agencies is causing the demise of the traditional agency.  Sure, that’s part of it.  But the underlying problem is deeper.  The heydays of the agencies were when companies were selling products.  The Agencies came into their own in the 1900s when, for the first time, mass production and improved distribution systems allowed mass, standardized products to be sold on a vast scale.  So the main task of an agency was to build awareness for those products, and communicate their virtues.  They had to build a brand or “trust factor” in the firms producing these goods as consumers were no longer buying direct from the manufacturer but from a distributor. (For example if you buy milk from a milkman you trust him, if you buy a carton of milk from a shop you have to trust the brand on the carton.)

Today the supply chain evolution continues and most products now

 a. have a service component built into them eg cars

 b. rely on a content ecosystem eg computers, phones, most smart devices

 c. are customized/customizable eg shoes, T-shirts, mugs, apartments

d. offer after-sales service eg cars, water purifiers, airconditioners

e. are tending towards an economic order quantity (EOQ) of one eg banking services, music downloads, videos

What matters to buyers is the total customer experience, not just the brand or the product attributes.  Yet, most agencies don’t talk customer experience. 

They don’t talk about supply chains, CRM systems, customer contact centers, returns policies, recall alerts, crisis communications.  They continue to pride themselves on beautiful campaigns that enrapture people.  And distance themselves from customer interactions.

For example, like many others I love the new Airtel HFZ campaign - but speak to users and they will complain about poor service, long hold time, call dropping etc.  So while you like the ad you may not actually buy the service because there is the vast ecosystem of your peers telling you another side of the story.  Much like how Vodafone’s (Hutch) doggie created the image of warm friendly customer service which again wasn’t necessarily reflected in true life.  On the other hand I didn’t quite like the second Indigo airlines ad.  But because the overall customer experience continues to be good I will continue to choose this airline.

Firms that want good advertising but also want a good customer touch program tend to use multiple firms. One for regular advertising, and others like Sapient Nitro http://www.sapient.com/en-us/sapientnitro/work.html for the digital experience piece.  Causing yet more revenue leakage for ad agencies already bleeding from the separation of media buying and the consequent loss of the 15% commission.

There are a few firms that do talk the language of customer experience design - Ideo, Frog Design and Wieden & Kennedy  to name a few (and I am not endorsing these).  And which do it under one roof.  These and others like them which are customer-centric are ideally situated to emerge unscathed from the Ice Age.  Many have a design arm which currently doesn’t do advertising but that’s an easy piece to add on to their other capabilities - and then they can really change the agency landscape.

  

After an MBA I wanted to do advertising so much that I turned down my campus placement and took the agency job at half the salary.  I learned so much in my 3 years there that it was a solid investment.  But in those days (1995-98) - under one roof - I got exposure to all the channels  that were then prevalent, whereas today, an AE would have to go to multiple firms and even outside the firm to learn about all the ways in which customers interact with brands.  Unless this changes, the Big Agency as we know it will continue to freeze.