I’m a failed account handler. Too shy, too disorganised and too easily bored to be successful suit, only surviving thanks to doing planning (yes planning, I still struggle to call it strategy) on the job without realising.
I could write good briefs and coax great work out of creative people, even if I couldn’t get the invoices right. I was even told to get out the industry at one point, however one kind soul told me I was in the wrong department, otherwise I’d be a teacher, an academic or maybe a lawyer right now.
My current colleagues probably wish I was a headmaster or human rights lawyer instead, sorry about that, but at least it means I respect great account handlers, in fact I’m in awe of them.
But I mean account handlers, not client service. The ones who not only make things happen on time and make it look easy, they work in partnership with planners, they have an opinion on creative work, they make ideas people feel safe, make horrible people play nice. They won’t let creatives act like children, yet allow for them being wired differently. They won’t allow intellectual planner wank, but make space for brains to play.
Even better, they ‘handle clients’ they don’t ‘serve’ them. This is no disrespect to clients, I couldn’t do their job either. By handling I mean not just saying yes externally and ‘the client won’t like it’ internally. They build a relationship, not a culture of subservience.
The ones who nurture ideas through their building and then through the client building, not the ones who shut things down.
The ones who partner clients, who look to deliver good advice and help them succeed, rather than the ones who simply say yes and make everything seem transactional.
The ones with more than charm and charisma, they build trust.
Increasingly, agencies have become a lot more about client service than client handling. There are many reasons for this of course, a big one being the increasingly competitive nature of our industry and growing cost pressures.
Yet the agencies we tend to talk about and the work we tend to celebrate, don’t just serve clients they handle them. They make money from delivering ideas clients couldn’t do themselves, even in-house. Not just because of talent and craft, because of positive friction – working on anything for too long makes you snowblind, but outsiders you trust provide the spark you rarely get in house.
Yes, there are great in-house teams, but the internal culture required for work that isn’t a box ticking exercise is the exception not the rule.
And more client service has led to less proper account planning too.
At their best, planners do a lot more than the ‘set-up’ for the creative work. They have a direct relationship with the client, a genuine partner with client services in the relationship.
But that link is increasingly severed, which also severs the most important link of all, the link to the ‘consumer’.
Planners are having less scope to go beyond primary research, to uncover the real truth and show clients possibility not of predictability. There is less of of planning as the first idea, more of planning as the first few slides.
A couple of days to do the set-up for creative work, then not even able to nurture the work itself.
As the relationship with client disappears (partly down to client services jealously guarding it as it becomes their only reason for being, but also because a transactional relationship makes the discipline nothing more than a powerpoint factory) there is more of just putting client research through a process, colouring in the client brief, or even just post rationalising creative work. Now let’s be honest, in many cases, post rationalising great ideas can be a good thing – but you need great ideas first and client service often doesn’t like them so they get filtered out. Or they allow mediocre creative to go unchallenged (but that’s another story).
Strategy was invented to be bridge between research and ideas, it was valued part of the client relationship. If it isn’t this anymore what the hell is it for?
So yes, here’s to account handlers, who do the most amazing job.
I’m obviously grateful because they allow me to do actual account planning.
I couldn’t do their job, but then again, neither could most client service.
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