What Happened To Account Management?

If clients want to get their money’s worth from their ad agencies, they should demand more from their account managers.  Unfortunately, over the past twenty-five years, account management has been emasculated.

Going back to the Mad Men days and before, account people had a very specific function that helped lead to great creative and media work.  Account executives (the term is used in its broadest sense for this post) worked closely with their clients and were marketing partners.  They did sales and marketing analysis, they went out on sales calls both at the retail level and corporately. As a result, they often knew more about the business than their actual clients.  All of this was to strengthen the relationship and build credibility so that the agency could sell its creative work.   

However, there was always an undercurrent of distrust between weak brand people and strong account people.  The concern was that giving away too much proprietary information might, somehow, hurt the client.  Many companies refused to share data feeling that it was not the agency’s business.  Many others did the minimum they had to in order to integrate their account people into their marketing and advertising.  Over many years, this situation spread and, gradually, marketing was mostly removed from the agency function.

Ad agencies established account planning, taking away the strategic function from their account people.  If one goes back to the beginnings of planning, that was not the intention.  The original planners were there to strengthen the communications function and to be the voice of the consumer, gaining insights into the market which, truthfully, many account people did not or could not do.  They were to be partners with both account and creative people.  But account people were often given the cold shoulder by planners who tended to relate better to the creative people, thereby weakening thie account function even further.

Fees, which became prevalent in the nineteen nineties, cut away agency profits.  This resulted in clients demanding that they be serviced only by senior people; unfortunately, this further limited the account function, since account directors and group directors were relegated to doing the administrative work that account executives had previously done.  Because so much of what junior account people did was handle billing and traffic, those functions were also removed from account people and given to lower paid project managers (or some other title).  

Media, while important, was always relegated to the bottom of the heap.  For instance, media was mostly the last to speak in creative presentations.  And, half a century ago, as media choices started to grow with the advent of cable, media buying services were developed.  Gradually, they gained a toehold in the business and became profitable.  The holding companies then separated media from their traditional agencies.  Over the last two decades media has become fractionated – spot, network, cable, digital, social, and many other aspects – which have complicated the media landscape in every aspect.  Media people always said that media was its own profession and in the mid-nineteen nineties, they got their way.  But, that took one other major function from account people.  Unfortunately, today, most account people have little or nothing to do with media planning, buying or analysis.  Media agencies have their own account people to handle clients and to deal with their traditional and digital agencies.  Even the media agencies owned by the holding companies have their own account people to deal with their traditional agencies.

All these changes served to weaken a very necessary function – working with clients to develop business and marketing and advertising strategy.  Today, we are starting to see that a lot of this work is being handed off to consultants, and as that happens, agency fees will get cut even more.  And account people may become superfluous.

It has become a vicious circle.

I fully believe that as account people have been removed from the creative and marketing process, the work coming out of agencies has become weakened.  Why?  Because account people were once fully involved with the creative process and were the source of information, insight and knowledge; that kind of insight helped creative people to do better, more effective work.  Today, since this function has been divided among dozens of people, many of whom work for outside companies.  It is very hard for an ad agency to have full control and oversight over the vision for its brands. And every brand needs a vision.

This is the vision that the pioneers of the business – Ogilvy, Reeves, Chiat, and many others – had that enabled their businesses to grow and thrive. The holding companies are just too big and complicated.