What young copywriters should know about ad agencies Advertising, as I am sure you know, helps make the money go round. It spreads the word; creates cashflow; occasions employment; and, done properly, fetches largesse.
Take the case, for instance, where a bright entrepreneur employs five hundred people to manufacture the definitive and provably-instant cure for baldness. Let's call it Hair Today. Unless consumers begin purchasing his product in something of a hurry, he will be in big financial trouble. With little or no revenue coming in, he will be unable to buy more materials and also somewhat short of the wherewithal to pay the workforce. So it's on the cards that Hair Today will be gone tomorrow. His business will collapse, his employees will be decanted onto the street, and you and I won't get the benefit of wondrous, flowing locks. It stands to reason, then, that he must make his product known far and wide; and he must sell it far and wide via advertising.
Now, where does he promote this supreme answer to every slap-headed individual's wildest dreams. Farmer & Stockbreeder? Hardly. Goth Weekly? Nope. The percentage of bald readers in the latter publication may not only be somewhat small, but also genuinely uncaring. Not to go overboard in this statement of the glaringly obvious, our manufacturer obviously approaches an ad agency where they know exactly how to market a product. Furthermore, they have the personnel who can expertly select the appropriate media for the job, and also people capable of writing, designing and illustrating his advertising in a convincing way.
To understand this more fully, we must take a look at the structure of an agency. In configuration it's like a pyramid. At the very bottom is the creative department: the writers, the designers and the typographers. If there were any justice in this world - which there patently isn't - this crew would be top dogs. After all, it's their ideas, their words and pictures which keep the rest of the pyramid gainfully employed. They aren't, so that's an end to it.
Now travel a short way up the pyramid and you arrive at the account handlers. These are the people who service clients day to day. Their function is to assist the client with his marketing strategy and help formulate briefs. (Notice the allusion to law, and thus the assumed respectability.) To the copywriter, a brief is an instruction about a given product, and when and how the client wishes to push it. More properly, a brief is an interpretation of market statistics, how the product slots into that market, plus every usable detail about the features and benefits of the product. The account handler fetches this information back to the agency, transmits the facts to the creative team detailed to work on the account, and then sits back and waits for their solution. Once this is provided, he returns to the client and presents the proposals.
Now, you may be forgiven for thinking that the run-of-the-mill account handler is little more than a messenger, fetching and carrying between client and agency. In all certainty, you are right. But before we go one whit further, allow me to say that I have nothing against account handlers - they have a rotten enough job without me making it worse by rubbing it in. I'll even go one step better and interpret some of the problems they face.
For some unfathomable reason, agencies always talk about clients instead of using the more earthy appellation of customers. Ask me why and I shall look blank - which I don't find difficult. One answer might be that the customer is always right and, as far as agencies are concerned, the client is always wrong. Certainly, some outfits are famous for being an unyielding bunch of diggers-in of toes, impassive turners of blind eyes and deaf ears. My own experience is that the majority of agencies, including some of the biggest, don't argue with their clients half enough. They go through the motions, of course, but deep in the heart of the average agency chief is the belief, probably implanted at birth, that when it comes to the crunch the client really knows best about his advertising. It is his money, isn't it?
Account handlers as a race, therefore, have an unenviable lot; they lead a harassed and hag-ridden life, badgered and kicked from all points of the compass. They are constantly haunted by the thought of all those pre-booked spaces in publications demanding to be filled by a certain date; and constantly frustrated in the filling of them by the unreasonable demands and continuing procrastination of the clients on the one hand, and the unreasonable attitudes and continuing procrastination of the creative mob on the other. Morton's fork and Procrustes' bed had nothing on what the unhappy 'suit' has to cope with.
Can one wonder, therefore, that he grasps at any supporting straw? Or that he doesn't feel impelled to put on the whole armour of God in defence of every ad campaign he presents?
Copywriters and designers are a different breed. Not necessarily a more attractive breed - just different. Unleash a copywriter on an unsuspecting client and he will defend the work he's done with a vehemence that would levitate tables. There is, undoubtedly, an explanation for this. If the copywriter concerned is any good, he will have put into any given piece of work a little of what passes for his soul; and no one takes a man's soul away without his kicking and scratching a little.
Advertising is a funny business, because it isn't only a business. Advertising, I hold, is half a business, quarter a profession and quarter an art. The proportions may be debatable, but the principle isn't. And it's the art bit that creative people feel strongly, possibly over-strongly, about and which clients tend to ignore.
Once in my earshot, a client asked a designer for a few more specimens. What he meant was a few more rough layouts or visuals. This in itself was bad enough, since the designer in question had been up half the night, slaving over hot computer copies of Quark Express and PhotoShop, producing the specimens mentioned. But to hear it expressed in such jar-and-litmus-paper terms brought the designer near to apoplexy. That he didn't have to stand trial for aggravated assault is only a tribute to my quick-wittedness. In a flash, I had forced a stiff whiskey down his throat and changed the subject.
On another occasion, an account handler phoned me to say that a client had to have a stick of copy, which was originally due sometime the following week, right away. "Give me an hour and I'll do you something good," I told him. "I don't want it good," he replied, "I want it now!"
Which just shows to go you.
Manifestly, a client should leave the creation of his advertising to the people he pays to create it; and if it doesn't get the results he's looking for all he has to do is change his agency to one that does. Copywriters and designers reckon they can do their job better than anyone else - and ninety per cent of the time they're right. Thus, the role of the account handler in the client/agency set-up is much that of a buffer. He is the fall-guy.
But this is a function not without its value. It saves direct confrontation, personal abrasion and a whole lot of account-changing. The system is essentially pragmatic and in business terms, pragmatism wins over idealism every time.
Farther up the pyramid are account handlers' bosses: account directors. These fellows and lassies monitor the handler's work on given accounts and do their best to appear to know what's going on when they see the client for lunch four times a year. It's their job, also, to make sure that the client pays his due bills. Account directors are the agency's marketing people proper; and I have a grudging respect for them.
Onward and upward, we come to the media planners whose job it is to select the right media, i.e. the correct market-place and audience for the product we want to move. Media people are learned people and extremely adept at buying space and air-time at preferential rates. I know of one highly respected media woman who makes more money for her agency, via wheeling and dealing, than any ten other people on the payroll. Media buffs are the dons of the advertising world; dedicated, quietly efficient and deadly at poker dice.
Around the middle of the pyramid come the traffic and production teams. The former are constantly in your hair, demanding this, that and the other to unreasonable deadlines. It is their job to pull all the ingredients of a campaign together - the copy, the artwork, the photographs, etcetera - to a timetable. They chase you, they harass you; and they won't stop until they get the piece of work in question. Then they bustle away to shade in the blanks on their progress charts. The latter, the production mob, have the job of collating all these various bits and pieces and ensuring that the whole schmeer gets to the printer or the newspaper in an acceptable form.
In a large agency, you will find intermixed with the foregoing departments, a myriad branch functions, i.e. experts on below-the-line promotions, experts on recruitment advertising, experts on print-buying and experts who seem to do nothing in particular, but are always hanging around at management meetings. These faceless ones are invariably the hatchet men, the horsemen of the apocalypse who descend upon the unwary late of a Friday afternoon bearing confidentiality forms, which you sign before receiving your severance cheque. Their war cry is often: "Sorry and all that, pal. We are letting you go. Please sign here and clear your desk."
Right at the top, of course, is the chairman. In a large agency, you might be lucky enough to catch a passing glimpse of him at the office Christmas party; and in a small agency, you might be unlucky enough to meet him every day of the week. These characters are usually ex-account directors or, worse, ex-accountants. They are answerable to the shareholders; and in this respect they are rather more in the business of making money than making ad campaigns. In a medium-sized agency of my acquaintance, the chairman was an excellent money-maker, but a very bad people person. On one notable occasion he ordered the company secretary to promote 'the little designer with the beard' to creative director. It turned out that of the nine designers in the building, seven had beards and only one was over five feet, seven inches. The company secretary, being a wimp and not wishing to rock boats by soliciting further information, elevated the wrong man - to the ire of the right man, no question.
He also had a shocking habit of firing people without actually telling them that they were being shafted. He would wait for the victim to go on vacation and then install a new recruit in the thus vacant desk. The victim would have no idea that he was history until he saw somebody else in his seat. This particular chairman died in middle age of a surfeit of white wine and frogs legs, to which he was, as it turns out, fatally partial. Someone once pointed out of him that his parents were, indeed married, but unfortunately not to each other.
Anyway, the above is no more than a general picture of agency structure. But I hope it helps when you finally get your feet under an agency desk.
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