Read this quote. It's from a fellow called Julian KYnaston. He runs a big-ish agency outside London:
“We tried to distill down what we felt agencies will be facing in this tough climate and we came up with a one liner, that ‘clients need better strategic advice faster’.
“I have not been a fan of the account manager and account executive role for years. Invariably, when an account executive aspires to be an account manager or an account manager aspires to be an account director there is an inherent compulsion on that journey for those people to make an enthusiastic attempt to offer clients strategic counsel or design critique. While that is fine for the structural growth of the agency I think that we have to be big enough to say that that is an awful lot of pissing around with a clients money.
evolution
“Our simple viewpoint here is that good business does not look like junior people trying to practice their art on a client’s budget. So, part of our evolution will see us remove the titles of account manager and account executive from our structure. In place of those titles we will simply have project managers. Those project managers will sit to the side or the back of the account director and we will see almost a return to the good old fashioned apprenticeships, where the apprentice learns their trade by watching their mentor deal directly with the client… but they do not learn at the expense of the clients.”
This approach to only allow senior account directors to deal at a strategic level with clients certainly appears to answer the one on-going client gripe: “I saw the account director at the pitch, but I’ve not seen them since they won my business,” but what about at a staff level? Is this approach not cutting off promotional opportunities for staff?
Kynaston says: “I suppose you can see the old agency head viewpoint on this. We are breaking down the sustainability of agencies, we are removing promotional and aspirational lines and even more so, we are daring to tinker with a structure that someone, somewhere has deemed effective for a long time. I do not think it is effective. The truth of the matter is that currently account managers and executives get a schooling in winning business and losing a piece of business in six to 12 months. That, to me, is not a great schooling. What we are abdicating here is a change in the account director’s role, a much longer apprenticeship, a much longer time to gain experience and a pegging back of the desire of an individual to hint it might be done a better way, but to watch the account director and learn from them – and one day we may very well have an account director recruit.”
I don't know what you think, but I fundamentally disagree. I'm not trying to say youth is right, I totally believe in learning by doing too. But the thing about the young is they haven't learn to stop questioning, they haven't learned to accept the status quo yet, they're not afraid to ask annoying questions. Quite right they should learn from elders, but quite wrong they should shut up, not have the temerity to think until they've passed some arbitrary rights of passage. If you think young people are wrong, prove it. How do you know you're right if you're not nervous anymore?
NORTHERN PLANNER 
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