The Account Executive

At my agency, there's a lot of talk about whether or not clients actually need an account executive. What is the role of an account executive? Does the role of an AE depend on the character of the agency? Of the client?

Large companies are trending away from putting all of their eggs in the Agency of Record basket, instead opting to distribute projects to several agencies. Let's face it: it's been a rough couple of years for retail, and budgets are shrinking. That's bad news to the MEGA-agencies, but good news to more nimble boutique agencies that offer lower overhead.

We are a smaller agency that prides itself on the accessibility of our partners to our clients. In this environment, ideally, there would be no need for an AE. But what about growth? As we gain more clients, it will be inefficient to bring on more partners. Could you imagine an agency with 6 partners, 2 designers, a book keeper and a traffic manager? How would we make any money? Would we truly be serving the client's needs?

But suppose the smallest agency in the world - a one man creative director/designer, takes on a large client. The creative director brings creative to the table - that's their job. But the client doesn't want to have to constantly reign in the creative director, they are going to want to farm their work out to an agency that can empathize with their needs, their limitations, and their struggles.

Call it an account executive, a project manager, and client relationship manager, whatever... the fact is that the role that these names represent is critical to agency's ability to serve the client and to serve them well.

The client's marketing and advertising assets need to perform, make money, move the needle. A creative director alone runs the risk of neglecting some of the metrics that go into the planning of how the client's assets are used. They could design a really cool ad that falls short of performing the function that the client intends for that asset to perform. It's an ad that gains tons of attention for consumers, from competitors, and from critics. The problem is that the ad doesn't sell enough of the right product to pay for itself, and is thereby ineffective.

In my humble, inexperienced view, it is the AE who balances out the client and the creative team, who makes sure that the client, in the end, gets the best possible solution to their current need. The AE is the clients inside man.

At the same time, the AE is the agencies inside man with the client, responsible for understanding their business climate well enough to suggest new tactics and initiatives that truly benefit the agency.

So, yes, the AE must represent the client to the agency, but the AE must also promote the agency's strengths to the client on a consistent basis.

My examples above are more about advertising and less about branding. For branding projects, for awareness initiatives, you might not need to move the needle. But even in those cases, you need an AE to get close enough to the client to understand their brand in order to insure that the agency is operating as an extension of that brand. Yes, you could have a creative director do this, but it's not an efficient use of their time - they are there to provide creative, not necessarily to forge a relationship with the client.

These are just my thoughts here - please feel free to comment. Are Account Executives a thing of the past? Are they always necessary? When are the unnecessary?