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Think that your rise up the ladder is fuelled by churning out volumes of work? Not if you work for 303Lowe’s managing partner and client service director, Tony Dunseath. He gives the AdNews Jobs Bulletin his thoughts below:
What does it take to become a top suit in this market? My answer is to stop thinking of yourself just as a ‘suit’.
The industry is stuffed with doers. It is a necessary skill set when you start out. But to move through the ranks, you have to look at what you’re bringing to the business beyond getting work out. Ask what value you are bringing to the planning, creative and production processes? Work out whether you are a partner for your client or just someone who gets the job done? Are you growing your client’s business and your account or just managing it?
We talk about three key areas of focus at 303Lowe in business management - creative, relationships and finance. They’re obvious, but they are the cornerstone to progress, and you need to be firing on all three to ‘make it’. Relationships and finance are fairly straightforward, but ‘creative’ is worth a few words as it is often overlooked and the reason people struggle to hit the high notes.
When I say ‘creative’ I’m not talking about getting out the magic markers and writing ads, but that you are fundamentally involved in the creative process. We are as responsible for the final creative product as the next person. You have to be proud of what we do. You have to love what we do. And that is simply not possible if you’re not involved. You must, and must want to, have a significant, positive influence on the final output of any given project. We’re all here to make incredible work, we love being in a creative industry but the business side of the game demands that the creative works.
You have to fundamentally get it. No matter what the final output is, our role is to guide, inspire and help deliver strategically sound and awesome, creative work. We call it transformational work at 303Lowe - transformational in that it positively and significantly affects our clients’ businesses. This is the work that wins Effies.
A while ago, I sent out a survey to a bunch of account handlers to find out what they thought their job was. The responses were very similar and focused on delivery. Accurate delivery is important, but delivering work that doesn’t answer the actual business needs isn’t going to keep or grow a client’s business. Long-term relationships and successful partnerships with clients come from delivering creative solutions that work for their business. We have to be a core part of the team that delivers these.
So if you want to be a top player, get strategic in your approach. We used to be responsible for planning before the account planner was invented in the 1960s. But now, for some reason, many of us don’t see it as part of our role. It is 100%. It is the foundation for any strong account person.
I’ve interviewed a lot of people and still I can’t get over how poorly prepared they are when I meet them. They haven’t researched our business and work. They haven’t looked into what is happening in their potential new client’s industry. And they don’t even know their own work well enough to explain how and why it was right. This is indicative of a group of people who don’t get what we do, why we do it and who don’t really value our role.
Be better than that.
I only hire people I genuinely believe have the potential to make it to AD or above. And the defining aspect of that is whether they see themselves just as doers or can prove themselves as people with the smarts and interest to be thinkers who will drive our business and our clients’ businesses forward.
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