Who's in charge over here?

How much strategy should the agency be responsible, and how much should the client be responsible for? I know that the easy answer here is: it depends.

It depends on the agency – are they a creative agency, or a strategic agency? Any agency, be it design or marketing or public relations, needs to play to its strengths.

It depends on the client – how robust is their internal marketing team? Smaller businesses may be starving for some strategy and insight when it comes to promoting themselves. Larger corporations may make all of the strategic decisions internally and just outsource the deliverables.

In any mid to large sized agency, I think the agency has a responsibility in most cases to provide some strategic thinking to the client. When you are in the agency environment, you are in the front lines of marketing, advertising and public relations. We are the folks that look at commercials with a critical eye, that read the paper and think, “I know exactly how this company profile got into the business section.”

Maybe it’s a new SEO tactic, or a new format for variable data in direct mail. Maybe it’s a more affordable way to get on the radio or on television. These are things that folks within the agency world will almost always hear about before the folks in the client world, and for that reason it’s the responsibility of those outside the company to provide strategic thinking.

So what’s the right answer here? Who ends up doing what? It’s got to be a balance. Nobody knows the client like the client, and nobody knows the possibilities of what can get accomplished like the agencies.

The client is like Honda – really well grounded, they know what they do and they do it well. The agency needs to be like a tribe of punk kids throwing as much aftermarket product at the cars as they can just to enhance the performance.

Screw Everyone Else!

Is there something to be said for Dodge here? Sure, everyone is thinking green and efficient and hybrid, and they're unloading a truck that's lucky to get 8 miles per gallon. But what if Dodge is right?

There are a LOT of brands competing for space out there in the automotive world. Dr. Z has hurt Dodge, and Daimler Chrysler in general, by blurring the brands. He's also tried to take some very American brands, like Dodge, and push them as cars with German engineering.

Dodge knows big engines and big trucks. Dodge has spent far more, per truck sold, than Ford or GM in the past few years, making "Hemi" a household name again.

While at first glance, the new Ram may seem counter-intuitive, let's look at the whole industry and where dodge fits.

Dodge does NOT have fuel-efficient little urban cars for the college age crowd - Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Scion and Kia have that.

Dodge does NOT have big, cushy luxury American cars - Buick, Lincoln, Mercury and Chrysler have those (why does Mercury exist? Different conversation...)

Dodge does NOT have high-performance sports cars the way that BMW, Mercedes, Audi and Porsche do

Dodge does NOT have the family friendly cars like the Honda Odyssey, the Chrysler Town and Country line, some of the GM trucks

Dodge DOES have big engines and mean looking trucks. Perhaps in putting out a vehicle that can actually claim to be Al Gore's nemesis, Dodge is only acknowledging that they know their role, and that they're comfortable there.

Marketers often talk about creating a niche, not keeping up with others. Dodge may very well be creating their own niche of bad-ass-trucks and, lest we forget, mean-looking-station-wagons.

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?

First Post!

Lately, I've been reading some marketing blogs such as Brand Autopsy pretty regularly. There's some great insights in here, but these blogs seem to be written for higher level marketing professionals.

I'm somewhat of a younger guy. I'm new at this game. I'm still learning. And I know that I'm not alone. So what I hope to do here is create a place where other young marketing and advertising professionals can stop by and share some thoughts and ideas from our point of view. It's not a view from the bottom, it's a view from the foundation.

You see, John Moore has had and will continue to have some great ideas. But Moore, and other higher level marketing professionals, rely on a foundation of young professionals to execute their strategies and tactics.

So, young or experienced, I invite you to stop by every once and a while, see what we're talking about, and share your ideas with us.

Thanks.