Account Management IS the Radar

A colleague lamented how things on a project were “happening under the radar”.  Another colleague, typically blunt, pointed out, “You are the radar.”

That’s always true for account people.  On every piece of business, account management is the radar.  We function like radar in at least three ways.

Fourth of a series

Expect the Expected

Account management is much more than project management, yet project management is a big part of what account people do.  Agencies are a service business and clients expect us to run the trains on time (and on budget, of course).  Once you get the hang of it, project management is predictable.

The first type of radar, then, is to expect the expected.  Think ahead.  If the creative idea will drive up the cost of talent, help the team figure out a plan rather than letting it go and surprising the client later.  As one of my first bosses said, “I always look for an A.E. who can anticipate.”

Expect the Unexpected

The second kind of radar is when something unexpected or unforeseen pops up.  This isn’t just watching out for the agency’s work, but the client’s business.  The highest tribute ever paid to an account person was MillerCoors CMO Andy England saying of Marty Stock:  He “often knows I have a problem before I do.”  It’s important to get the context here:  England was referring to Stock’s foreknowledge of a business problem, as in declining market share, disastrous trial for a new product, or a new competitive threat.

These kinds of things aren’t so predictable.  Then again, most of the advertising industry isn’t so predictable these days, so get used to it.  Expecting the unexpected also includes staying on top of new media, new products and new ways of doing business.  If you’re on top of the changes, you’ll be much more useful to your client.

Radar Navigates

An account person isn’t simply a radar operator.  It’s your job to lead the team in setting a course.  Where does the business need to go?  Maybe an iconic, long-running ad campaign needs to be updated – or replaced.  Perhaps you’ve identified a market opportunity where the client should line-extend or develop a new product.  Or you noticed a competitor’s blind spot your client can exploit.  It’s possible that the consumer is changing and it’s not good news for your brand.  Working with your team, you can choose the right priorities – not just doing things right, but doing the right things.

We think of radar as something that detects unplanned things or events, like bad copy test scores or alien invasions.  But radar is also a navigational tool, helping you stay on course even – or especially – when the voyage is smooth.

Your Radar for 2013

This is a great time of year to think about setting the agenda for your work in 2013.  The last weeks of the year are a reflective time, given naturally to assessing what we’ve done and what we want to do.  If you’re experiencing a huge end-of-year rush, it’s still a good time to think about next year.  Nothing clarifies your thinking like a busy season.

You might be a junior account executive and think it’s not your job to set the agenda.  No, but you can contribute to setting the agenda.  Advertising is a team sport.  Bring your ideas forward and be ready to learn.

Next:  The Road Less Taken

Bad Account Management Leads to Bad Creative

The first two posts in this series outlined how advertising agency account management is at a crossroads, identifying (so far) three reasons why:  (1) Surrender of Strategy, (2) Project Management, and (3) Inward Focus.

Why should we care?  Because bad account management leads to bad creative.

The Shared Purpose of Account and Creative

The purpose of an ad agency is to build a client’s business.  The main way an agency builds its client’s business is with creative.  Transformative ideas that don’t just entertain or inform; they change behavior. 

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In this sense, one of the key roles of an account person is to create an environment for great creative.  That means:  Knowing the client’s business; gaining their confidence; getting to the right copy strategy; finding the right channel mix, and speeding the approval of the actual creative.

So the account person has a critical role – but never works alone.

The Shared Partnership of Account and Creative

In my experience the agency’s work is best when there is a strong partnership between the account lead and the creative lead.  Actually this partnership is important at all levels, but the account and creative leads have to set the example.  As an account management leader, my job has been most satisfying when I’ve had that kind of partnership.  I need to have someone to collaborate with, someone to work with, and – yes – someone to fight with.  In the words of King Solomon: “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”  (I don’t mind adding that talking over this post with a valued creative partner caused me to totally rewrite what you’re reading right now.)

A strong, honest partnership results in great creative because the account director and creative director push each other.  Do we understand the consumer?  Have we defined the business need?  Is the claim relevant?  Can we turn this into a compelling story?  Each must do their job and allow the other to ask hard questions so the advertising can do its job.

This is somewhat of a checks-and-balances relationship but not a back-and-forth argument.  Instead it’s a “Yes, And…” collaboration where the account director and creative director build on one another’s contributions.

The Curse of Project Management

When account people don’t hold up their end of the relationship, it’s harder to deliver great creative.  The strategy and the creative are less likely to carry a business rationale.  Can the creative director do it anyway, with the assistance of the strategic planner?  They’re forced to try in organizations where account management is more like project management.

It would be so much easier for all of them if the account person, who is talking to clients anyway about meeting schedules and approvals, would also be the agency’s voice on business strategy.  That client relationship would go from transactional to consultative with a good amount of effort beyond just project management.

The Shared Partnership of Agency and Client

Still, that client relationship is not the exclusive province of the account person.  If an agency’s relationship with a client relies only or mainly on the account person, then it’s doomed.

The best creative directors I’ve worked with are the ones who care about the client’s business as much as I do.  That kind of commitment shines through in client conversations – why not let the client see that passion at work?  A good account person makes that happen.

Next:  Account Management IS the Radar

Three Things Killing Account Management

The first post in this series made the case that advertising agency account management is at a crossroads.  The best account people are the ones who bring business-building ideas to their clients.  Many people still do this, but there are also a lot of people with no ideas, no curiosity, and not much else beyond project management.  If we continue down this path, account management will become a lost art.

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Bag Carriers and Flower Pots

For decades, “bag carrier” was the worst epithet you could throw at an account person.  To be sure, one of my tasks as an assistant account executive at Leo Burnett was to carry the bag, but once we arrived at the meeting, my job was to help sell what the bag contained.

Years later in Latin America, a Mexican client, commenting on the meeting participation of one of our account executives, told me:  “No necesitamos un florero.”  We don’t need a vase, or flower pot.  This, too, is an old phenomenon.  What makes the modern situation different?

Three Things Killing Account Management

There are three things threatening the role of today’s account executive.  All three things are realities but none of them need to be barriers.  These are factors to leverage, not limit, what an account person can do.

1. Surrender of Strategy

There have been two major changes in the advertising agency model over the past two decades.  One is the unbundling of media planning and buying.  The other is the advent of Strategic Planning.  Account management surrendered responsibility in both cases.

Strategic Planning makes agencies better in two ways.  First, it adds to the team someone tasked with understanding the consumer better than anyone else.  Second, its deliverable is great creative.  Great strategy doesn’t matter unless it results in great creative.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with some incredible strategic planners who bring both benefits.  I’ve also seen some account people walk away and let those strategic planners do it alone. 

This is tragic, partly because account people used to do both of these things.  Embracing strategic planning, however, doesn’t mean surrendering the responsibility to add value via consumer insight and sharp strategy. 

The implication is that account management does less thinking, and hence is less useful to clients.  So how are they spending their time instead?

2. Project Management

In many places account management has yielded to project management.  One big reason why:  Labor-based compensation.

In the days of Ye Olde Marketing, when clients paid agencies a 15% commission on media and production, agencies had the financial flexibility to throw a lot of smart people at the business, people who brought the clients business-building ideas.  As the commissions dwindled, budgets got tighter, and one day everyone was getting paid by the hour.

We’ve already criticized labor-based compensation in another post.  The point here is different:  Labor-based compensation depends on a defined Scope of Work consisting of specific projects.  We’re expected to spend x hours delivering y number of TV commercials, mobile apps, shelf talkers or direct mail letters.  Rarely does the scope include “a POV on how larger consumer trends affect our starter-and-refill strategy.” 

In other words, agencies only paid to deliver ads aren’t likely to budget for staff hours devoted to added-value.  The account people will do whatever they must to get the ads out the door.  That’s more like project management:  write the timetable, schedule the meetings, and recap it in the email.  Everything must run smoothly in the agency.

3. Inward Focus

This is the most pernicious part.  Account people who disconnect themselves from consumers and strategy, working instead on project management, inevitably wind up with an inward focus.  That’s deadly in this business.  If your only contact with a client is answering their phone call, if your only understanding of a consumer comes from what you read, and if your only cooperation with colleagues is transactional, then your world is very small.

Advertising’s world is big.  That’s one of the things I love most about it.  Advertising gets you out of yourself.  You learn about human behavior and human achievement.  That is, why people buy the things that people invent.

Next:  Bad Account Management Leads to Bad Creative

Account Management at a Crossroads

Is great account management a lost art at advertising agencies?

First of a series

Like everything else in advertising, account management is changing.  In this case, though, it may not be changing for the better of agencies and their clients.

Account People of Ye Olde Marketing

I never advocate for a return to the past, but a fast review of history is instructive.  Advertising agencies have only been around for a century or so, growing out of the business of media sales, especially newspapers.  Up through the 1940s, when radio was an important medium, the account executive was a multipurpose player, handling clients, research, copy, talent and production.  (If you want a good insight on this period, read The Hucksters by Frederic Wakeman.)  Starting with the creative revolution of the 1960s, the modern account executive role took shape.  The guy (yes, they were mainly guys) who represented the agency to the client and the client to the agency.

Some Things Don’t Change

Regardless of era, the greatest account people then and now are the ones who bring ideas to their client.  Creative people bring creative ideas, media people bring media ideas, and planners bring strategy, but the account people should bring business building ideas.  It’s not enough to know what the agency sells and how to deliver on it.  You have to gain intimate knowledge of the client’s business (like this and this).

Something Changed

In the last decade or so, there have been signs that account management lost its way.  While you can still find great account people at advertising agencies, you also find many who bring no ideas, no curiosity, and not much else beyond project management.  Read these points of view by Babita Baruah, Lakshmipathy Bhat and Robert Solomon and see if they don’t ring true.  A year or so ago the New York Times ran an article suggesting the “account executive” title was outdated.  Back in 2010, Advertising Age observed that some agencies were indeed cutting the department entirely.

Something Needs to Change

I’ve had this discussion with a number of people from around the industry, and unfortunately there is a lot of agreement.  Delving deeper, there’s a sense that more experienced account people know or remember what it’s like to be a business partner, not an order taker.  We’re not training the less experienced people, however, like we used to do.  The art is getting lost because we are not passing it along.

Account Management at a Crossroads

Starting with this and a few more posts, we’ll try to start a discussion about the state of account management, and how to ensure it adds value in the modern advertising agency.  I’d welcome your comments and suggestions, starting in the space below.

Next:  Three Things Killing Account Management

Consumers, Shoppers and/or People

Consumer or Shopper?

Words mean things.  When you have a choice among two or three words to describe something, the word you choose directs your meaning.  We have a lot of choices in the advertising industry.  Media or Channels.  Media agnostic or Media neutral.  Creative or Content.  Then there’s Consumers and Shoppers.

Consumers and Shoppers

For decades, most advertising people referred to their client’s customers as “consumers”.  There were exceptions, like the mobile phone maker who sold handsets to retailers so they could sell to “end users”.  Of course, every company defines their own target, like the QSR chain who wanted more SHUs (Super Heavy Users) or the brewer who really understood KBDs (Key Beer Drinkers).  The industry generic term, however, was “consumers”.

Not many years ago, the rise of shopper marketing created an industry trend seeking to distinguish “consumers” from “shoppers”.  The thought was that “consumers” see your advertising, but by the time they reach the store, they are “shoppers”, prone to forget what you told them once they see a special offer, display or demonstration.  The store was a medium and its audience was shoppers. 

Mobile Changes All That

We used to distinguish between Consumers and Shoppers but that’s no longer helpful because it’s no longer a distinction.  The shopping process starts at home, when the Consumer sees your advertising and starts researching or even shopping online.  If a trip to the store is involved, the research may even continue at shelf.  The advent of Near Field Communication is going to propel that behavior.

In other words, a Consumer becomes a Shopper much earlier in the purchase process.  (We could go a step further and say that a Shopper was always a Consumer in the end.)

Why It Matters

• Marketing has to be integrated just like the purchase cycle.  In the early days of IMC, marketers and agencies made matching luggage, and in more recent years discovered channel planning.  Often, though, we were artificially connecting the channels.  The mobile device makes that connection more genuine than ever.

• Mobile’s influence will always exceed its budget.  There’s a lot of industry discussion about how Mobile’s enormous usage “deserves” a much greater percentage of the marketing budget.  I would argue for Mobile’s cost-efficiency:  You spend less because it’s targeted to people who ask for the messages.

• Consumers, Shoppers and/or People.  Consumer insights and Shopper insights all come from people.  It does little good to segregate consumer insights from shopper insights because it's all part of the same, continuous purchase cycle.  You have to understand the whole consumer.

Or the whole person.  As a creative director once asked me:  Why can’t we just call them “people”?

Advertising Jumps the Shark, Gets Back on Track

Does content deliver advertising or does advertising deliver content?

Joe Mandese at MediaPost has the answer for you, in a piece headlined “Advertising Jumps The Shark: Becomes Conduit For Content”.  

But first let’s get through that headline.

Jumping the Shark

Numerous readers pointed out in the comments section that the headline misused the term “jump the shark”.  Any student of pop culture knows the story:  On the 1970s sitcom Happy Days, Fonzie water skis over a shark, a moment now seen as the point where the show lost its original purpose – a fond look back at the 1950s – and got just plain silly.

Let’s first admit that the advertising industry has jumped the shark many more times than Fonzie, before or since.  We’ve jumped the shark via pointless line extensions, bad strategies, failed campaigns and poor planning.  Mea culpa.

Conduit for Content

In this case, the alleged shark jump is the launch of a new digital advertising platform that pulls existing Internet content into online ads.  It seems like a simple concept – link ads and content – but there’s a bit more involved.

The platform’s purveyor, Kontera, claims to be able to identify the most relevant content and serve it in web display, social and mobile ads.  That’s a bit more complicated than a shark jump – and more revolutionary.

3 Reasons Why it Matters

Mandese’s right, this is an important development the entire advertising industry should watch.

1.  It makes advertising useful, informative and/or entertaining.  These are the three things audiences seek in any medium.  For some reason we’ve been relearning that lesson the hard way in the digital advertising world.  In this case, Kontera claims to be supplying content that’s already popular, and hence should make ads more relevant.

 
2.     It adds sanity to online advertising.  Most web display advertising is the opposite of shooting fish in a barrel – more a minnow in the ocean.  You run ads that get clicked at infinitesimally low rates, paying only for those very small results.  Matching truly relevant content to truly relevant ads could significantly shift the equation of supply and demand.
 
3.     It challenges the distribution model.  Whether on TV, online or in-store, content normally is a means of distributing advertising.  That is, a :30-spot interrupts the program you were watching.  Kontera allows advertisers to buy ad space and use it to distribute all kinds of content.  Extrapolating that beyond web display ads, you can see how it would change journalism, entertainment and information in general.

Fond Look Back at the 1950s

If you read further down in the comments section of Mandese’s article, you’ll see an arcane conversation between him and me about whether it was also true in the 1950s that “advertising (was) a means for distributing content,” much like Kontera.  My point is that Radio and TV shows of the period, like soap operas and Texaco Star Theater, were also examples of brands delivering content.  (Mandese disagreed.)

It doesn’t really matter.  The only thing it proves is that for the past fifty years we’ve been force-feeding audiences our advertising when they wanted to see their content.  Up to now web display ads have followed that same model.

If, as an industry, we succeed in reversing that, and make advertising a means for distributing content, we won’t be jumping the shark.  We’ll be back on track.

When Plural is Really Anti-Social

Today's post is brought to you by the letter "S"

Just like 70 million other people, we watched the U.S. presidential debate this past Wednesday night.  I caught the first half hour on NPR while driving home, and joined Mrs. Ad Majorem watching the rest on ABC News.  Before leaving work I checked Twitter to see what hashtags would be in circulation, because of course I expected to participate in the national conversation. 

A #debate about #debates

My unscientific sample of tweeps, political consultants and other citizens led me to believe that #debate would be the default hashtag for most people.  Some put #Debate2012 or some variation.  Others with an agenda put hashtags supporting their candidate.  But #debate seemed like a good one.

Watching on TV, however, I noticed that ABC was encouraging the hashtag #debates – the plural.  Why not just #debate?  You’ve only got 140 characters, why use one of them on a vestigial “S”? 

Look at that S-car go!

It turns out that ABC News was following Twitter's lead.  According to a Twitter blog post, they declared #debates as the official hashtag.

It had never occurred to me to check and see what Twitter was pushing.  My normal procedure is to check and see what people are doing.  

It's not hard to imagine that Twitter has an internal team working on this series of debates:  producers, editors, journalists and social media experts.  They may be “the debates group” or they may just tell people, “We work on coverage of the debates.”  Sitting around the conference room table, it would be easy to agree on #debates as a hashtag.  

The Twitterverse looked at it differently, however.  No one watching at home was thinking about a series of debates.  This was the big night everyone in the U.S. had anticipated for weeks.  The social media commentary was about what happened that very night.

Put another way, I don't think anyone imagined #SaveBigBird.  

Maybe Twitter wanted something trackable.  I give them credit for not using #TwitterDebates -- you know, something “branded”.  Still, pushing an "official" hashtag reflects the mindset of an Old Media company used to broadcasting and big numbers.  Social Media works differently.  The relevant measure might be share of conversation, or the number of conversations in which they participated.

Watch and Learn

In the end this is a mental exercise.  Watch what is happening around you, and game it out.  Learn from what others do.  In this case the lesson is:  Not even Twitter can control its own conversation.  Try to swim with the tide, perhaps influence it, but don't imagine you can control or measure it according to some standard of Ye Olde Marketing.