One of the worst mistakes made in some advertising firms is to let the account team call the shots. This situation is quite easy to spot from the creative side. The signs are:

• Having your copy rewritten or layout redesigned in chicken-scratch before it goes to the client.
• A lack of discourse between the creative and account teams during development sessions.
• Account executives acting as messengers from the client rather than intermediaries.
• A general “last minute” feel to every job at every point of creation.

If you are noticing the above conditions at your job, chances are you are at an account driven firm, and you’re probably involved in more “churn and burn” than “concept and develop.” This is bad for everybody involved for a variety of reasons. To be account driven means that instead of acting in a partnership with your client base, you’re subservient to your clients’ every whim. While this may give your clients a feeling of control, they aren’t getting the full benefit of your expertise. Remember: they clients come to advertising professionals for the skills they lack, for perspectives they don’t explore, and for executions that result in both long and short term sales targets. If account executives merely accept and direct according to the clients’ wishes (that day, hour, ect.) astute businesses will wonder why they don’t merely open up an internal shop, instead of farming out the duties to your agency. Indeed, I’m working at an in-house creative department specifically because the powers that be eliminated the middle men, saved money and increased the branding through synergy.

The key thought here is partnership. Let the clients provide you with all of their brilliance regarding their particular “widget,” but we need to provide them with a point of view, a method of conveying the brand of that widget, while still making an impact in the market. And the masters of the domain of brand aren’t the account executives and their assistants, but the creative team of writers, artists and producers. In short, the creative staff is the commodity. They have the skill set and the vision and talent to set them apart in this field. To put it another way: anybody can get a marketing degree and take dictation from a client. Not everybody can create a brand from scratch. Not everybody can be creative. To flip this coin to the other side, creative professionals have few outlets for their talents to be used (fewer still if you want to create and not wait tables at night.) An account executive can go from an ad agency to a phone company’s marketing department with ease.

The key thought here is commodity. Personally, I’m always amazed that I make a very good living solely by writing. If they didn’t pay me, I’d still write for the simple joy the written word brings me. I write because it’s fun, because it’s just an integral part of who I am. That people keep cutting me checks for it is merely a great, unexpected bonus. But along the way, I’ve learned that for most people (account executives included,) writing is a chore, a task, a skill learned in school by trial and error. If you don’t believe me, read a creative brief and count the incomplete thoughts, the misplaced emphasis, and the stifled sentence structures.

So why is it that anybody who thinks they can write a simple declarative sentence, can replace the wording and structure of the person hired specifically to write in the first place? This is true on the art side of the fence as well: why is a ’schematic’ drawn on notebook paper from the account team better (and more approved) than your graphically designed vision? Well, if your clients aren’t partners and the creative team isn’t a commodity the agency, the people calling the shots are the very same people who can go work for the phone company.

As creative people, we need to take ownership of our commodity status. We need to remember the following three things:

• Not everybody can be creative. We are rare.
• The only thing that distinguishes an advertising firm from a marketing firm is the creative department.
• We are the creators and the developers of the brand.

No, don’t get me wrong: just like account executives, creative people can be both ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ Especially in today’s day and age, where anybody with Quark and InDesign is suddenly an ‘art director,’ finding the creative staff with true talent is increasingly harder than ever. One way I’ve been able to separate visionaries from sheep is in resume analysis. If you see a CV full of sidestep moves (or no moves at all,) you’re seeing a sheep who took some classes at the local learning annex (or worse, a lazy person who is wasting their potential.) However, people with vision demonstrate progression, taking steps forward at each and every stage of the game. This is the creative staff that you want to assemble if you’re an owner, and the people you want to work with if you’re a professional. And if you are on the account side, this is the creative team you want to support.

The key thought here is support. Far too often, account driven agencies foster an ‘us versus them’ mentality. The creative staff is stifled and strikes back, and the account team puts up a wall in defense. The sad part of these situations is that nobody is really to blame here: it’s the structure that’s out-of-whack to begin with. The account side is “just doing their job,” according to company policy and client wishes, and the creative side, while not cowed into sheep-like complacency, is resentful that their profession has been reduced to plugging in holes as directed. They need support, not dictation. A good account executive isn’t a parrot from the client, but a brand ambassador to the client. The creatives build the brand, and the account team makes certain that the branding is consistent and targeted in every communication. In this manner, the advertising agency takes ownership over the very thing that separates them from other businesses: creative intellectual property.