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Why has the role of the agency account executive changed? What skills do they now need? How should organizations change to make way for the new, super AE? Brian Maynard of KitchenAid, Sandy Uridge of Kellogg, together with Caren Berlin and Steve Gold of Arc Marketing scan the new horizons of agency account executives.

Why has the role of agency account executive changed over the past five years? MAYNARD: The classic account executive role is going away. The person who I think of on our advertising business as being our AE is really our VP. The level at which we're dealing, the dollars and the concepts are bigger and so we're looking for more experienced people. Because there are now an amazing abundance of possibilities, the AEs are now finding themselves in a position of evaluating and making a lot more decisions on their clients' behalf than they did in the past. The role of the AE in the past has been -- I don't want to diminish their importance -- but almost that of a minion. They were order-takers. Several of our account people now have voicemail boxes on our phone system, and probably 2-3 times a day I forward a query to them for evaluation. In the past, say five years ago, I quite often handled many of those initial queries myself. I just don't have the time anymore, so a lot is passed on to the AE. URIDGE: Because corporations have become so lean in their staffing, we really rely on an AE to do much more than come in and present some creative and go back and change it -- or maybe do some media stuff here and there. AEs are handling things that, if I had more people, we would be handling internally. In the same vein, clients have really come to expect more out of agencies overall. Agencies need to become more than just a place that does some creative, or does some strategic planning. We really expect our agencies to understand our business and work just like we do. BERLIN: The client staff has been significantly reduced while the projects are more complicated in nature. Projects span multiple disciplines, and involve more complicated initiatives, such as events and interactive. That's required account executives to change how they interact. The level of involvement with the project, in terms of facilitating the communication back and forth between the client and the other people at the agency, has increased. GOLD: Agencies have gone from being siloed as promotion agencies, direct agencies to basically being marketing agencies that are non-biased. That means agency account executives are problem solvers, and solving problems requires a lot of skill sets. There may not be a promotional answer, there may not be a direct answer, there may not be an Internet answer.So agency account executuives must have a much greater breadth of understanding of the various marketing disciplines. What skills does today's AE need to survive? BERLIN: The skill set required is really an evolution. The skills that made a good account executive in the past still need to be there. But AEs need to expand their purviews of marketing and the different skill sets within marketing. The ability to manage a project, see the big picture, attention to detail, follow-up, good listening skills and pro-activity are all still mandatory. But the additional skill sets required are understanding new technologies, new media vehicles and how they all interact with one another to come together for the programs. The challenge for AEs is signficantly more complicated, because the demands are not just from the perspective of an agency's client, who potentially is just the manufacturer, but also the retailer and their needs. It's not just a matter of which displays you put up in-store, but also bringing all the different disciplines to bear on the program. URIDGE: The most important thing is a sense of urgency. AEs have to have a huge sense of urgency because I'm in a very competitive environment, very busy constantly. I'm constantly traveling and I can't have people who are just like, "Oh yeah, I'll get to that." I need AEs to keep me on track. I'm very conscientious about getting back to them but I like them to be following up with me, not having to go, "You know I asked you for that thing, do you still have it, do you have it yet?" So good follow-up, and on the flipside of that, not to be bothersome. It's a fine line between being a resource and calling with questions fourteen times a day and being a pain in the butt. MAYNARD: The most important skill is one that is difficult to read from a textbook or take in a college class and grasp. And, in fact, a lot of people never get it, even with experience. It is the ability to remove your personal "baggage" from the decision making process. When AEs are looking at offerings and ideas, it can be really difficult for them to set aside their personal biases. They have to know how to think like our target. It doesn't matter whether they personally like a particular idea or not; what matters is whether the idea is going to be relevant to our target audience. Some people just can't seem to shut their egos down long enough to understand that their personal reactions may not be relevant. GOLD: An AE needs real understanding of what they're selling, because there are people on the client side who don't necessarily have a diverse background. Clients are relying on their account executives to ask the right questions and get the right answers. That's why, at Clarion, we are gradually creating what we've called "executive producers." We really see account people more as producing events than just executing them. What are some of the ways AEs can acquire those skills? GOLD: When I was on the client side at General Foods, the first thing they did when you accepted a position was send you out to the field as a sales person. It wasn't a choice; you went into sales for up to three months. There is some really good thought process behind that. The more you're exposed to and understand what the other person's job is, the better off you are in the end. Very few CEO's ever make it to the top without having sales experience. Even if they come from the marketing side, they all have at some point been out in the field. The same now holds true on the agency side. The people who have the best careers are those who have really delved into their careers from a lot of different perspectives. For example, sports is fun and entertainment is fun, but it's critical to understand how sports and entertainment work within the entire framework of what a brand is trying to accomplish. URIDGE: I really feel that people who are good marketing people and who are good account executives are born that way. It sounds funny but I just really feel like either you have it or you don't. That doesn't mean that you can't get better. But some people are just never going to get it, no matter how much training you give them. MAYNARD: The AE needs to be able to get into the hearts and minds of what their consumers are all about. We have a little test here at KitchenAid. In North America, KitchenAid markets five brands of appliances. Each brand has a different primary target audience. Anyone can take this test, and the results will tell you which category, which consumer segment, you fall into. For the segments that don't necessarily apply to you, you can at least try to get into the mindset by thinking, "Oh, that's my mom." About two years ago, we took twelve, senior-level KitchenAid people to the Culinary Institute of America, and spent 3 or 4 days there. As part of the experience, we made them, for four hours, cook dinner. The whole idea was to get into the hearts and minds of what our consumer was. The same holds true for the AE. BERLIN: The best way to acquire the skills is to jump right in and get involved in the project and understand the different nuances and what's required. But because the business of building brands has become so much more complicated, we need to provide training for new skill sets. There are some very good training programs out there. We're starting to look at online opportunities. There are a lot of fantastic online courses that account creative production people can participate in sitting right at their desks. That really gives us the ability to be very flexible. How must the agency organization change in light of this new role for the account executive? GOLD: For our agency, it's changed a lot. We've gotten rid of the traditional pyramid structure, which most companies work under. Pyramids are a business structure where young people flock in from the bottom of the pyramid, and as the older people retire, the newer people are pushed up to the top. The problem is, you've got a process with too many people in it -- particularly people in what we would call an account executive role. So, we've streamlined the process so that we're realigned around "pods" of, say, three or more clients that have similar needs. Each pod is its own company, in effect, with about fourteen people who work in each pod. So, we spread the organization out wide, versus high. Our people are no longer just account people or just creative people. We've done away with the two traditional sides of an agency -- the account side and the creative side. We're all on the same side now. Both account and creative people now operate as a unit, as if each pod were its own business. As operators of their own businesses, they have their own P&Ls, they have their own objectives, revenue targets, profit targets and so forth. The objective is to empower AEs with more skills as well as the ability to use those skills. So if you train all these people to have lots of different skill sets, they don't need nineteen bosses like they used to. You empower them to run their own businesses. If they succeed, they succeed in a lot of ways. BERLIN: The problem is, if we start segmenting different responsibilities among a variety of different people, the cost becomes prohibitive. There is no accountability because nobody's really overseeing the project in total. Because of the complicated nature of the projects, things will fall through the cracks. So we need to step back and re-examine how our teams are set up, and flatten the organization so we give our people the tools and the authority to manage the project full out. URIDGE: The agencies that cut through the red tape are the ones that really are succeeding. We work with the largest agencies and we work with some of the smallest. Sometimes you can get a better product faster with the smaller agencies because you don't have a lot of red tape. As we rely more heavily on AEs to be an extension of our staff and require more of their time, we require more of their time working on our work. That doesn't mean more time for them to go back and deal with a lot of paperwork or go through a bunch of layers. MAYNARD: When we reorganized KitchenAid, about a year and a half ago, we went to, at that time MacManus, which has now merged with Leo Burnett to become Bcom3. At that time, we had about six or seven different agencies, maybe more. We told the chairman that we wanted to be more cost effective and that we wanted an integrated approach. We asked them to reorganize around our needs and not theirs. The bottom line is, Bcom3 has reorganized and taken the AE role to a more senior role. There's a guy now at Bcom3 who has taken on the additional role of the director of integrated marketing for the KitchenAid account. He's making sure that everyone is working together. He actually is a senior VP partner, but he really is playing the traditional role of the AE in many ways. How must the client organization change? MAYNARD: We have reorganized around brands, as opposed to functions. That's the short answer. For many, many years we have been a manufacturing company that just happened to market appliances. What we are striving to be is a marketing company that just happens to manufacture appliances. A lot of corporations, no matter how hard they try, have silos. At one time, there was no one at a very senior officer level in the corporation that was responsible for KitchenAid, per se. There were directors of cooking products. There were directors of refrigeration. There was a marketing communications person. The IT function handled the Internet and that was a part of corporate. In other words, there was no basis for integrated marketing. We still have a long way to go, although we've made a lot of strides. URIDGE: We need to be more open and more honest with our agencies. If we're requiring account executives to be more of an extension of our workforce, then we need to treat them like an employee and not a vendor. That's just something that’s very important to me -- that any agency I work with is part of our company, they are a partner. They're truly an extension of my workforce and so I treat them that way. There still are times when people in our company will say, “You can't give that to the agency." And I'll say, “They know everything there is to know about us, so why shouldn't they know about this?" The organization as a whole has to understand that. BERLIN: It's equally important that the clients train their staffs similar to way agencies train their staffs. The client also needs to understand the dynamics of the marketplace and how it's changing. The client doesn't have to be an expert -- that's why they've retained us. But they have to have a general knowledge of what it takes to get things done. For example, when we first moved from traditional board mechanicals years ago to digital, the perception among some clients was, "Wow it’s much faster, it’s much cheaper. We can do things in a two-hour turn-around that used to take two days." But the reality is that the new technology didn't totally change the skill sets required. You still need the same level of thought and creativity and focus that have always been required to put a project together. GOLD: I'd like to see companies restructure so that the agency group is matched to a client group -- so that there are counterpart business units on both the agency and client sides. It wouldn't be as fragmented that way. You would have a business pod at the client lining up against a business pod at the agency. How will the relationship between agencies and clients change? URIDGE: As the industry pushes and becomes more competitive, we will require better performance from our agencies or we’ll end the relationship. Obviously as we consolidate, and agencies consolidate, there are more opportunities to lose business if you don't perform. I'm not even going to get into the performance-based agency compensation issue. I’m not really talking about that. I'm just saying that, on an overall basis, complacency is not going to be tolerated. MAYNARD: The relationship, in our case, has grown more positive, trusting and open. For any brand, you need to have the kind of relationship with your agency like what you have with your spouse or sibling, or someone you trust implicitly with all of your secrets and warts. The agency needs to be aware of everything because that allows them to do their job more effectively. Quite often there is a sense of wanting to hide things from agencies, like how much money you have to spend. Overall, the agency-client relationship is becoming more open and the line between where the company begins and the agency ends is becoming more blurred. BERLIN: The agency is becoming more pro-active, identifying opportunities for the client, leading the client much more than in the past. There are a lot of ways that we can enhance what a client was originally thinking because we have so many different people with so many different skill sets residing in the agency. As you bring different people together with different knowledge bases, we can identify new and different ways to achieve their objectives. Our hope is that the client acknowledges the different skill sets that reside here and takes advantage of the thinking and the experience that we have in very different categories with very different kinds of clients -- and that they can expand their thinking to try new and different things. GOLD: I'm one who believes -- and I've heard many other people say this -- that all the ad agencies will be gone within fifteen to twenty years. They will be replaced by marketing agencies. You shouldn't have advertising agency planners setting strategic directions for a brand, advertising people then working from that and then taking what the ad agency has done and passing it on to marketing services to finish the job. What you should do is have strategic planning start at the very top. The strategic planning function should include people who are representative of each of the marketing disciplines. The strategic plan then should be passed down simultaneously through advertising, marketing and so forth. It really doesn't sound that complicated, but that's a huge difference from where the business is today. It will take a long time to get there. That's the biggest challenge. What other changes must agencies make to improve their effectiveness? URIDGE: Agencies need to get better at managing their time. Don't make the client responsible for your ineffectiveness. Now if there are legitimate reasons -- the client made changes, the client delayed or whatever, I understand that. But sometimes there’s too much staff or they’re inefficient, or red tape gets in the way. Sometimes I feel like I’m responsible for the agency's P&L! Obviously we do everything we can to make our agencies more efficient with changes on our end, but ultimately it's their responsibility to be efficient. MAYNARD: Agencies need to stay true to their own brands, and that means being honest with regard to their abilities and what their resources are. Maybe the client wants to do an infomercial and the agency says, "Oh yeah, we can help you with that." Well, maybe the agency doesn't have any expertise in infomercials. Maybe they don't have the right people to do that kind of work. Agencies need to be more honest about what their abilities are. GOLD: It is not so much the little things that agencies have to do. It really is a matter of redefining the industry that agencies are in. Let's start with the fact that marketing is bigger than advertising. If you go to college, advertising is taught as a subset of marketing. But when you go out into the real world, it's just the opposite -- marketing is regarded as a subset of advertising. So the real world doesn't play out the way that you learn about it in school. A correction of advertising's traditional dominance of the entire marketing process is the most important thing. The process is painful because it's happening more slowly than it should be. But it's interesting to be part of it and to see that it's actually happening. It's happening now because there's no stopping it. BERLIN: Agencies need to make a lot of changes. The account executive and the people we bring in need to have the proper training and a sophisticated understanding of what it takes to build a brand, to create programs and execute them flawlessly. Again, the agency needs to structure themselves around not only individual people, but also how they work. We need to structure ourselves around the client to be able to deliver whatever that client needs. There needs to be a commitment both on the client and agency sides to changing the way we do business. As the marketplace is changing and all the other dynamics are changing, everything won’t be perfect the first time. But we have a vision of what it takes to build the brand, of what it takes to create success in the marketplace.