Simon Veksner: Presenting
April 15 2013, 11:57 am | | 11 Comments
By Simon Veksner head of ideas Naked Communications Australia and NZ
I’ve always thought it strange that creatives do the presenting.
An agency hires creatives to come up with new and lateral ideas. Hence, creatives think differently to most people. They might be a bit weird. Maybe introverted.
Meanwhile, the agency hires account handlers to manage the client relationship. They normally have great people-skills, and will typically be confident and charming.
So who does the agency ask to stand up and present to clients? That’s right. Not the confident and charming ones, but the weird shy ones.
11 Comments
“My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard”
Maybe clients are getting a little more sophisticated and so they can see through the Account Manager BS?
Depends on the client, depends on the team. It’s important to partner with account person and at least look as though some semblance of thought, preparation and theatre has gone into the idea which we are so adamantly selling.
Why do I find that baboon’s pink bits strangely alluring?
Most account people couldn’t sell iced water to a man in the desert (or whatever that saying is).
@stating the obvious, so you mustn’t be a copywriter or a suit.
AD, surely?
Perhaps it’s generally because when Accounts try and sell something they have little understanding of the reasoning behind, or the ability to provide answers on the fly to questions regarding creative adaptability.
There are obviously some that do, but in my experience most account handlers are nothing more than smiling message conduits between creative and client. The string between the two cans if you will.
Because account service have been known to preface the presentation of a campaign I’ve slaved over for at least a month with talk like, “Ok, so we’ve got this ad and I think it’s on brief, but if you don’t like it, we can change it to whatever you want. It’s no problem. I don’t know if it’s my cup of tea either so just be aware, you don’t have to approve it if you don’t like it.The team is quite happy to keep working back so you get what you want.” Yes, the useless suit was from Ogilvy, why do you ask?
Creatives who don’t present are like a pilot who is scared of heights.
It’s part of the job, get over it.
Suit slayer – I worked at an ostensibly ‘creative’ agency and my ECD said that stuff. I hate advertising sometimes 🙁
It wasn’t always this way….
I’m still young but old enough to remember the cardboard box ECDs would give to the suits before they left the agency. ‘If you don’t sell it before you come back, you know where your things are.’
Not an advocate of that, but certainly fed up with the fence sitting 99% do these days.
There was another method – make the suits more scared of you than they are of the client. Couple of CCO / ECDs around these days that followed that advice as young creatives, they’ve won more awards and less respect than Lance Armstrong.
Personally I hope for a move towards the best work being made – not what the client wants, not what the creative wants, but what the consumer wants to see.