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How can strategists find time to manage accounts when they’re too busy dictating creative?
Retool is the perfect way to describe what CDs do. Great job.
Strategists shouldn’t be expected to “manage accounts” at all. But at a certain level they should be ready and able and willing to lead and challenge clients in partnership with account when presenting work.
This is a continual drip (sometimes flood) I’ve seen and am currently experiencing. A lot comes down to simply being capable and trustworthy adult on account/s that might be light with those.
Therefor, a lot of times unintentionally, there is a slow leak of extra asks. The only to stop this is to formulate clear definitions of strategy outputs, know where we begin and end, and live that out consistently.
However, strategists hate binary absolutes, including role definitions. We need to get out of our way with that in order to maintain focus and boundaries.
I think this is heading back to where ad life was before strategy was brought over from across the pond. Before account folks had to be strategic since there was technically no strategy. Then strategy was introduced as a discipline. Given the continual crunching of budgets I’m not surprised this is happening. The question is will account folks become more strategic or will strategic folks be more account. I see the same thing happening with PM. Something had to give
Maybe it’s time to evolve titles and roles. Arguably with the complexity of different messages, placements and need to create and solve for placements that maybe the ad agency produced and maybe a partner and maybe an influencer and maybe a social team responded. Current account roles are not set up for that consumer facing critical strategic thinking. “Creatives” also need to (and the good ones have) evolve beyond just concepts and waiting for a brief and understand the entire plan. Maybe it’s still some critical role for consumer, brand insights and planning, but when you get into the actual messages and plan, that person needs to be account and strategic and work with other agencies and be creative problem solvers.
That and long gone are the days of getting a client to pay $600k+ for 2 different teams of account and strategy in its current state.
I don’t mind when account is strategic – in fact I expect it. But the ways we are strategic and apply strategy are different.
There is no way I would ever want to do an account person’s job. Ever.
Creatives are picking up the slack too.
Are you sure this is the expectation and you aren’t over stepping? First time in my long career my strategist is bossing me around/trying to do my job. If I wasn’t freelance, I’d tell her to f*** o**.
I'm at a place where strategy people are being encouraged to take up the title 'client lead' and completely see this happening everywhere. Does that mean I'm not going to progress unless i turn?
Eh, I like working with clients closely. Way more efficient and it’s great for the creative work as I can often defend their ideas in different ways to clients.
How tenable is this long-term? Will the end result just be over worked strategic account directors who end up becoming managers of teams because the work load needs to be distributed?