Management Perspective

Recently I attended a conference with a whole bunch of agency people. Present were owners, account managers, programmers, videographers, technicians, CMOs, CEO’s, COO’s, designers, statisticians, writers and at least two completely off the wall, crazy for the sake of being crazy, outrageous for the sake of being outrageous, dudes. The conference had attendees from some of the largest agencies in the country as well as some people from tiny, one or two person shops.

In three days there were nearly twenty different presentations covering a multitude of timely, interesting and important issues in this industry.  However, it was both amusing and surprising to find that the presentation that generated the most uproar, the one that created a complete hail storm, the topic that united all these diverse people, was the belief of a British agency owner who stated in his presentation that his agency did not have, not did they find necessary, account managers or account executives.

Even the two crazy guys thought this was nuts.

If you are an account manager you know how important your job is. Simply put, someone has to be in charge of the details, manage to process and make sure the business and clients needs are met. If you’re not an Account Manager, you probably already know that you are not the person for this job.  The surprise was, faced with the idea of an agency without account managers, all the non-account managers in the room became instantly aware of how important this job is to the success of the agency.

-Maureen