Put two dots on a piece of squared paper and you have a line on a
graph; two similar appointments in the same week and you certainly have
a trend. And when the appointments in question are at the media
companies of two of the biggest advertising groups in the business
(Omnicom and Interpublic), then you might just be on to a pretty
important trend.
The first involved the promotion of Jeremy Tester, a media director at
New PHD, to the new position of client services director as part of a
wider restructure where both Morag Blazey and Jon Wilkins were made
joint managing directors. The second saw Universal McCann inviting
Yvonne Scullion, a board director at Zenith Media, to join the company
as client services director. Again, it is a new position within the
agency.
The surprising thing, though, is the fact that both companies were
prepared to make much of the fact that these were new functions. Are
they making an admission that they’ve been muddling along all these
years without account handling skills?
Not at all, responds David Pattison, the chief executive of New PHD -
it’s just that, in the past, the role was managed on a far less
structured basis, usually by the company’s founders. But he does admit
there has been an widening skills gap in recent years as the role and
status of media specialists have evolved.
In the past, account handling was often the province of creative
agencies because quite a lot of media specialists’ business came via
that route.
These days they win all (or almost all) of their business on their own
merits. It’s taken companies like New PHD a while to realise they have
to stand on their own two feet when it comes to account handling.
Pattison states: ’The way that media companies are relating to clients
now has changed and the services they provide are different. We need to
improve account handling skills across the group and part of Jeremy’s
job will be to do that. There are three aspects to that. First, he will
help me with senior client contacts. Second, he will export his skills
within the organisation. And, third, he will be a focal point people can
go to to ensure they have the necessary resource, personnel and way of
managing our clients. The days are long gone when we could rely on
someone else doing it for us. Also, the fact is that we have grown and
we need to devolve management to more people.’
Chris Shaw, the joint managing director, echoes much of that, but he
disagrees about the existence of a structural skills gap. He comments:
’From our perspective it’s not an issue about (a changing relationship
with) creative agencies - we’ve always believed we have a very strong
account handling culture. It’s more a measure of how much we’ve grown
rather than an admission that we weren’t doing it before. As new
business has come in we’ve gone along and staffed from the ground up
and, having doubled in size, we have found ourselves with a very flat
structure and not enough reporting lines. It has become very difficult
in practical terms to cope with 12 group account directors.’
So perhaps all we’re seeing is the emergence of a new badge of size and
status. Perhaps - but it’s more than that, Pattison argues. He adds:
’You’ve also got to look at the way our business is changing. A couple
of years ago, we only had two specialist units outside the core media
planning and buying agency. Now we have nine - and though it’s true that
most clients come through the front door because they want media
planning and buying, media really does embrace an incredibly wide
spectrum of things these days. Clients are demanding a lot more from us.
In fact, sometimes it take a while for everyone to realise that what
they’re actually asking for is quite new. We need someone to be able to
sit there and take a judgment if it’s the sort of thing that’s going to
be a requirement for a number of our clients. We have to be able to
respond to that.’
