John Drake

What Makes A Great Account Person

The ad industry has lots of books on brand strategy, creativity, web marketing, direct marketing and so on. But little has been written about Account Management. This isn't good. If there's one department that could use the advice, it's this one, because the role of an account person is subjective and differs greatly from agency to agency, and from account to account.

But I don't think understanding how to be a great account person requires an entire book. This is a role of quick thinking, adaptability and leadership... as long as a few basic principles are embraced, one can perform beautifully. So, for collective thought and debate, below are eight things that junior and mid level account folks should embrace--in my eyes. After 10 years, and a collection of different agencies, I feel the below points make the difference between good and great.

So to all the aspiring account folks out there, please consider the following...

1. HELMUT KRONE. Heard of him? If not, you should look him up. If you don't have the desire to look him up, you should get into another department. A great account person needs to crave the creative process and understand it. Buy a book on design (here), understand what makes great writing and have a brain that's full of brilliant advertising while also being able to cite where it came from. It's impossible to recognize great work if you don't have points of reference.

2. GET THE BEST WORK OUT OF THE AGENCY.  Hopefully you're surrounded by good talent. If so, rest assured, they have great ideas running through their veins constantly, and you need to pull them out. Quite simply, the account person gets the best work out of the agency, and this goes way beyond creative. Is the media plan innovative? Does the PR team have enough room to take risks? Does the web team have enough time to finish the comps or should the meeting be canceled (which is fine to do, by the way--JWT/NY's Hildie Newman was a champion of this when I worked with her. If the agency isn't ready for the meeting, move it). 

3. YOU'RE THE CMO. It's been said that "the account person is the voice of the client at the agency." No. They ARE the client. Seriously imagine that. Imagine consumers and the sales team calling you about their dislike of that headline...Can you defend it? Imagine walking the CFO through the production budget... do you understand it? Imagine having to defend the media selections to the CEO...why are we using podcasts? The crew at Dailey & Associates is great in this area and Torch's Jennifer Doud is the best I know at it. 

4. GET OFF YOUR A**. Nothing replaces face-to-face leadership. If you work in an integrated agency the best way to relay intricate client feedback to the web guy, the PR girl, the Account Director and the media planner is to go around and tell them in a way that directly applies to their contribution.

5. DON'T SAY "THANK YOU" SO MUCH. Writers aren't doing YOU a favor when they revise copy. You are both on the same team, solving a problem together. Saying "thank you" after leading someone is often condescending and infers that they are all doing the work while you are going to walk off and do nothing. Which isn't the case (see #6). Find another way to end a conversation other than a pedestrian "thanks."

6. OUTWORK EVERYONE ELSE. For the great account person, work is never done. Some department is in need of love, so go find it when you have down time. After that, mine the world for new thinking. It's amazing how many great ideas can come from the account team when they actually have time to think. Also, never leave your team. If the media dept. is still working on tomorrow's presentation as you're heading out the door at night, offer aid. Always lead. Byron Oshiro, an account leader at Wieden+Kennedy, is typically last to leave every night.

7. CHILL. Deutsch's Jeff White is a master at this. Nothing rattles the guy. A great account person never loses their cool. And there's nothing more annoying than a nervous and stressed account person. In advertising, things have a way of working out in the long run, and great account people know this.

8. PRESENT CREATIVELY. Step outside of Microsoft Word and learn InDesign. Give a presentation with only imagery. Mix it up. You'll be surprised the response you receive.

That's it. Anyone have more?

Good Work by Carlsberg

Stumbled across a great video from Carlsberg and thought I'd share. The casting and overall tone are perfect.

The CNN-YouTube Debate

I think America moved forward last night. The CNN-YouTube  Debate was an excellent exercise in technology and presentation and, I believe, highlighted for the mass market what the tone of America should be all about from here forward... While I assume that behind-the-scenes the debate wasn't as spontaneous and random as one might wish it to be, I still hold it up as an excellent use of communication. One thing is for sure: give people the tools and the opportunity and they will prove that we are diverse, creative, genuine and courageous.

Beyond this, I think we'll see several things become more accepted at the mass market level:

1. Short Format Videos (and other alternative ways to present information) will Finally Permeate Corporate Cultures. So far, this has been slow to take off, but I suspect that will come to an end. Employees throughout organizations will be more expected to look for better ways to communicate ideas rather than simply defaulting to bullet-pointed PowerPoints (which I can't believe how often I still see). Many of us have been waiting for this for years...

2. Mass Acceptance of Humanity over Formality. I got a better "look" at the candidates last night than I ever had before. Why? Hearing a moderator ask a question about health care creates a far different environment than hearing the question directly from someone affected by it first hand.

3. Wholistic Presentation Trumps Details. 39+ people officially put their entire well-being out for the world to see last night. They can never take that back, and it's there, for all of us to revisit, whenever we want, forever. And given all that, viewers didn't analyze the parts and pieces of their questions, but rather the entire delivery as a whole. Let's learn from that. As marketers, we can over-analyze the details of our communication so much that we take our eye off the complete message, and end up diluting the impact.

CNN and YouTube jointly pushed mass market America into the 21st century. There are people out there (probably 20%) who already practiced the points above, but that leaves 80% who needed the nudge.

Collectively, we all benefit.

Cheers.

Bring Back Classic Courage

Tonight's premier of Mad Men allows me the opportunity to showcase something I may otherwise never find the occasion to showcase, and that's the classic Bernbach stuff for Chivas Regal. In my eyes, the below ad is perfect: informational, all about the product, brand-ownable and entertaining. But it almost never made the books...

Lore has it that the client became unglued when Bill presented it (probably in a smoke filled room in midtown like we'll view tonight on the show.) After a lively and respectable debate, the client finally caved, but said, "Bill, how about we change it to say: 'What genius changed the Chivas Regal bottle'?"

The ad ran as we see it. Sometimes one word can make the difference between forgettable and classic. And in the 50s and 60s, when working in advertising was down right envied, our industry brought pride and courage into meetings. Which in the end, I'm sure clients appreciated.

Work Ethic

Today it was announced by Adweek that Crispin, Porter + Bogusky landed creative duties on Open from American Express. A moment of respect and praise for CP+B please. I think the industry agrees that Ogilvy has done great things with that account ever since David himself won it back in 1962. That must have been a dogfight.

I've been waiting for the appropriate moment to say something about Crispin... Lots has been written regarding their innovative use of media, their philosophy about what advertising is, and their creative success in general. But what I admire about CP+B most is their work ethic.

I've never worked there, but I can feel it from 1,000 miles away. Like many of us, I've heard stories. And reading their employee handbook confirms this. (It's great, and if you haven't seen it, go to their site.) I believe the thing that sets Crispin apart is that they will simply out work you. Stay up all night. Spend the weekend. Work over Christmas. Do whatever it takes to find the solution. I don't want to take anything away from whatever creative ideas they brought to AmEx Open (which I'm guessing were great), but I'm betting they wanted it more and worked harder to get it.

These days everyone wants to know things like: Is viral better than TV? Should we be blogging? Podcasting? Using bluetooth messaging? The answer: Probably all of it. But that's not what agencies and marketers want to hear, because it means more time and more work. Pat Meeley and I have discussed this in depth: There is no magic marketing bullet. You want to be the best? Work harder. Stay later. Redo things. Come in on Sunday morning.

I worked at Deutsch from 1997 - 2003 and was fortunate to experience the fantastic ride they had as five time "Agency of the Year" from Adweek and AdAge. A big part of that success was that no one worked as hard as we did. The team was working all the time, and the success that came from that was awesome. The folks at CP+B have been experiencing that for a few years and that energy and confidence and pride probably won't come around again.

Advertising history says that it won't last forever for Crispin... but it also doesn't say when it will end. So enjoy it, because when you look back after it's all over, I promise, from a career perspective, it will be worth it.

Cheers. 

Taglines

An epic tagline sums up both the emotional and rational ideas of the brand: "Just Do It." "I love New York." "Nothing runs like a Deere."

Something that drives me crazy in this business is when companies who have an outstanding tagline walk away from it. And I don't just mean, stop using it... I mean when they disrespect it.

Avis is the lead example. In the 60s Doyle Dane Bernbach created "We Try Harder." Quite possibly one of the best strategies and taglines our industry has ever seen, it was about the idea that when you're #2 you try harder. Every execution paid off that idea. It also had an emotional component that everyone could identifiy with. Avis still uses that tagline (I'm sure because quantitative data says that people know it) but they no longer pay it off. Yes, they talk about having iTunes, but that's not the human element of "we're trying harder to do whatever it takes, to earn your business." This is:

A second example has bubbled up, and it pains me because I love the newest agency on the brand and would love to know how much of this direction is coming from the client vs. the agency...  In the mid 80s Ammirati & Puris made BMW "The Ultimate Driving Machine." BMW still uses that line, but there's very little emotion tying back to it. The line is so visceral, but now, their advertising talks about how BMW is an independent company, and a creative company, and then ends all these ads with "the ultimate driving machine." (?) To me, those things don't really relate. In Fast Company this month, there's a four-page spread with different shots of a 3 Series being built with the ending line of "built from the bottom up to be an Ultimate Driving Machine." AN ultimate driving machine? I just wonder why BMW marketing isn't pushing the brand to emotionally pay off the line like they used to.

And finally, what ever happened to "Finger Lickin' Good?" and "It's Miller Time?" KFC and Miller have floundered around for years animating their icons and changing brand ideas seemingly every quarter. What up?

I'd love to know because creating such a tagline is extremely difficult. These brands are sitting on a gift and they're not fully embracing it. Which pisses the rest of us off who toil for years hoping to get remotely close to something so powerful and ownable.

Great taglines sum up the emotional AND rational ideas of the brand. A very difficult thing to do.

Please, I beg you, take advantage of this if you have one.

 

Watch Mad Men

A reminder that on Thursday, July 19, the new series Mad Men begins on AMC. It's from the executive producer of the Sopranos, the intro music is by Amy Winehouse and it's about 1950s advertising complete with smokey meetings and whiskey at 4:30. Looks like there's a deeper story woven through it though (like all good shows these days.) I think it looks great. Check it out here

Hoping to Build a Great Brief...

I've been struggling to find a great creative brief 'template' for years. Chris Ribeiro and I got close to something pretty effective at WONGDOODY last year, but given the constantly changing state of the business, I thought it was time to go back and build upon it. My hope is to one day create a brief that will, more times than not, set the stage for big, juicy ideas like Diesel Denim Dating.

At es/drake I'm starting a planning group from scratch and figured it was time to tear into this subject. So, with help from a few friends, I gathered briefs from around the industry and picked them apart. I also spent lots of time on planning sites and blogs, took a hard look at the day-to-day volume of work at agencies and looked back at some of the better creative work I happened to be involved with and then analyzed what went down to get it there. Finally, I took into consideration the integrated state of our agencies: PR people absorb things very differently than designers, but they need to collaborate from the same document.

Here's what I think I've learned.

First, briefs aren't always necessary. With A-Tier talent, good ads can be done in less than 48 hours. A talented creative team can get to a really good "ad" very quickly if the need is concise and the account person has their act together. It's also worth noting that when there's little time, no one over-analyzes.

But whenever there's a business problem or campaign, briefs are necessary. And today, campaign success is achieved by a series of small bets. Therefore, briefs need to open up the playing field to allow creative and media people (who are briefed at the same time) to think about ads, web, pr, event, guerrilla, direct and new media simultaneously. To do this, I'm trying an IDEA BRIEF. Taking up two-thirds of one page, it consists of 8 parts, each of which are universally understandable to ALL integrated departments...

THE BRAND:
A succinct, easy-to-feel set of words that the brand delivers on.
(Nike: If you have a body, you are an athlete.)

TONE:
Meticulously crafted words or phrases that describe what every piece of communication should feel like. (Not "wise" and "fun," but perhaps, "mature with wit."

STATE OF THE BUSINESS:
A three sentence snapshot of the industry and your client's role within it.

THE ASSIGNMENT & CHALLENGE:
A succinct description of what's needed and why that's a challenge.

STRATEGY & SUPPORT:
The key points-of-difference the client provides that solve the above Challenge.

TARGET:
A qualitative overview of the mindset of our ideal consumer.

PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS:
Roadblocks the team need to know: the client hates yellow, we only have $10k, etc. (This is not things like legal, which can be added after the idea is done.)

DESIRED RESULTS:
Measurability. Should tie directly back to Assignment & Challenge. 

That's it. Anyway, I thought I'd pass it on for others to experiment with and improve upon. And again, this isn't my work but a collection of stuff that was floating around the industry that just seemed to make sense to me when pieced as one... Yours to try. If you wish. And if you know of something better, (or if someone else is doing the exact same thing) please, pass it along, my friend.

I'm ashamed I never thought of this

Over the course of my ten or so years in this business I've worked on numerous package designs, FSIs and coupons for things like cheese, candy bars and hamburgers. In each case, every creative execution had a bar code; a series of numbers and bars that identified each product. I must have sent hundreds over to my clients for speedy approval and supervised countless more as Account Coordinators who worked under me did the same.

Bar codes are ugly and we see them everywhere. And they were always considered a "must do." Like putting a stamp on an envelope. And never once did I stop and ask myself, "does it always have to look so damn ugly?" I didn't know we could do this:

A surfer on a bar code? Apparently, yes! (I don't believe this got the public recognition it deserved when it launched.) If I would have just stopped for a moment and said, "could this be a block of cheese? A smile? Could it look like piano keys?" Anything. If I would have just stopped and asked these questions, maybe one of my clients could have been first to do this. But I didn't stop and ask, and my clients weren't first.

The surfer bar code took home a Titanium Lion award at the Canne Film Festival, and rightly so.

In advertising (and in all business) we need to structure our companies in such ways that we give our employees time to stop and imagine. And then we need to reward those ideas.

We also need to challenge ourselves to look at things that seem, "normal" and ask questions about how we can be different.

My best advice to do this: take a given situation, problem or object and ask, "What's the craziest, most un-doable idea here?" That answer will be a lousy and mostly un-doable idea. BUT... Now take that lousy idea, trim the fat, play with it a bit, involve others, and odds are, you'll get to something really cool and new. The trick is putting your ego aside to volunteer a bad idea (sometimes publically), and then finding the time to stop the action and play with the idea.

Honesty as an Opportunity to have Fun

Today, if companies are misleading, untruthful or using fancy marketing as a cloak to cover up realities, word will spread. And it will spread immediately. We'll take a picture on our phone, txt someone, maybe even post something online about it.

So what's a company or brand to do? Take a lesson from the global marketing department of Garden City, Idaho's West River Inn:

Be honest about what you are (and what you are not), and then have some good, clean fun with that.

In reality, if you're a phony you WILL be discovered, it's just a matter of time. This wasn't the case 10 years ago, or, more broadly, throughout the growth of business in general, and companies are having trouble accepting this. Ever since the industrial revolution, business is conditioned to act in certain ways, and one of those ways, was to use big, subjective words and phrases that were only loosely grounded in reality. Things like, "luxury," "friendly sales people," "one of a kind," "great-tasting," and others, have been so inappropriately used that they are now... bankrupt.

On the national level, Apple took home top honors at the AMA Effie awards this year for their Mac-PC comparison ads. The company was honest about their users, themselves, and had fun with it. As a Mac user, I was proud of the campaign, and any non Mac user out there who identified with the Mac computing lifestyle suddenly understood the reason to buy. I have a hunch that the folks at Gateway wouldn't have been comfortable taking that risk. They might have said: "well, we could be for everybody if they just knew these 7 points about our product." No. That sounds good in a PowerPoint presentation to Wall Street because it appears safe, but that's not the reason consumers purchase from brands today. They do it based on their worldviews.

Being honest saves companies and consumers valuable time. Businesses large and small shouldn't fear this, because we're going to see lots more of it, so they won't be going at it alone. Which is excellent for everyone. Letting the honest nature of brands come through attracts the people who embrace the same worldviews, while helping to eliminate those who don't.