Things I wished I knew before I got into advertising

Two years before I got into advertising, I didn’t even know advertising was an actual job. I thought the only available career choices were law, medicine, or engineering but none of those were real options for me because of my average grades. Like many young graduates from the late 90’s, I opted for programming. Actually, my original choice would’ve been to go to cinema, but my family scoffed and gave me the old: “there’s no money in that”. So I got into programming. 

And I hated it.

Still, I toughed it out and graduated, worked a few years only to confirm: I hated it. Years later, a friend of mine suggested I consider advertising seeing that I was the “creative guy” in our group. 

Truth be told, creativity is what allowed me to justify staying in programming for so long because there was always the distant option to branch out into video games. I felt it had a strong creative component to it and perhaps I could come up with an idea for a game or story. But it never panned out. 

When advertising got on my radar I initially eyed getting in as a copywriter, because at that point I had a lot of creativity built up, but I was eventually counseled by a teacher, who happened to be a client service VP at the time: “Shut up, you’re 100% an account guy and you’re coming to work for me”.

So I did. Still, my desire was to be in the creative department and so I figured, “I’ll get my foot in the door and I’ll eventually switch departments”. I hadn’t realized that not only is that not a common thing, but most of the skills aren’t easily transferable from account management to creative.

Like many before me, I got into the ad business in client service not exactly understanding what it implied, and to top it all off, my focus was solely on being involved in the creative aspect of the business. Fifteen years later I’m finding out that it’s the same deal for young graduates who are trying to make their way in advertising today. 

If you’re thinking of getting into client service, understanding the reality of the role before you get started will influence (for the best) every aspect of how you look at the job in the future. Here are a few truths that I wished I had better understood before I got into client service in that they would’ve helped make the best of my humble beginnings as an account coordinator.

It’s essentially a management job

Advertisements don’t get made out of thin air. Transforming ideas into fully produced ads is a lengthy and complex process and it’s unlike most types of projects. Still, projects run on people and information. There needs to be one entity (and one entity alone) in charge of making sure all the pieces are moving along. In most industries, that entity is referred to as a project manager, in advertising they are the client service department. Had I understood that, I would’ve been more tuned into making the best of my management-oriented tasks as opposed to waiting to be around where creativity was taking place.

Client service is a central role

I remember hearing someone say “Client service is like the nervous system of the agency”. Having a centralized resource that is accountable to dispatch work and information is what project management is founded on. Agencies as a whole depend on the client service department to be the glue that holds it all together. Their role is so central that if they don’t act accordingly and do what they are supposed to do, the entire agency suffers. I didn’t realize that by not doing something as silly as filing the proper client communication on the cloud, other team members wouldn’t find the info they’d need on-demand to complete their part of the project. I was too busy trying to think of cool ways to improve our ads - which in essence is fine, but only after I had done what was expected of me.

You won’t really be a part of the creative (the way you hope you will)

Client service is there to help fuel and guide the creative product, not develop it. It’s something you learn the hard way, especially in bigger agencies. You’re not brainstorming and you’re definitely not influencing the creative the way you may have in university or school. I kept hoping one day I would be a part of the creative machine as a coordinator and it never really does happen. 

Client service is undervalued

It’s easy to pinpoint what the creatives do - they come up with the ideas. It’s also easy to pinpoint what the media department does - they buy the ad space. Same for production. It’s much harder to pinpoint what client service does beyond managing. Even then, managing is often perceived as simply pencil-pushing. At times, being a coordinator can feel like you’re a referee, your objective is to fly under the radar and simply facilitate the terrain for the players to do what they do best. Fact is, without client service, the whole process breaks down. Bottom line, good client servicing is hard to quantify and easy to undervalue. 

Don’t assume 

I had assumed my clients knew everything about the advertising reality simply because they were there before me. I assumed my creative team knew everything about my clients simply because they were there before me. Client’s aren’t always well educated on the role of an agency and its processes. They often need to be reminded of basic agency functioning. Creatives aren’t always educated on the client’s business reality as a whole because their area of focus is to bring the brand to life through creativity. They often need to be reminded of certain client realities. Being everyone’s pop-up reminders can make it seem like it’s getting in the way of “doing our actual job” when in fact, it is our actual job. We’re there to contextualize and bring people out of their lanes to remind them of the global picture. We can never assume people remember what we’re mandated to keep track of and ask them to give it the same level of importance.

Advertising is expensive

When clients go through an agency it’s because they have considerable funds invested in their advertising. Reserving media space be it video, print or web is costly. Producing the final ad that gets seen is costly. Paying the agency fees to come up with the ads, is costly. Advertising is a risky and stressful financial business investment for clients and when they rely on their agency to broker that investment, it can be difficult to manage the client relationship on the day-to-day. It’s easy to forget what’s on the line when it’s not your money being spent. Understanding that reality would’ve helped me be aware of how tense the climate can be and better navigate through it, rather than just thinking my clients were out to make me a miserable coordinator.

A lot of the day-to-day is solving everyone’s problems

The way the process was first described to me felt so straightforward that it was hard to understand as a coordinator how we kept hitting so many road bumps during projects. Truth is, there are many constraints and curveballs that can monkey wrench the day-to-day: time, budgetary, legal, logistics, communication just to name a few. There’s always something to steer projects off track. Still, as a coordinator, it’s easy to think that these issues just magically get resolved by people who know best: the right people come together, talk it out, look in their playbook of solutions and pick one.  Our limited experience at first makes it that it is others that solve our problems and because there are so many of them, it’s easy to think that problem solving is someone else’s job. Unfortunately, solving problems, yours or other peoples', is at the top of the job description, if it’s not, then someone wrote it badly.

Don’t ever leave a meeting or conversation without…

..understanding without fail the proper ask, next steps, and expectations. If you don’t know what is being asked of you, what the upcoming set of actions are, and what is expected from those actions (from whom and by when), then you’re likely to come back to the same starting point, except with less time on your hands. As a coordinator, it's natural to be nervous during client meetings (or meetings in general) where we’re accountable for actionables. It’s also a normal reflex during these stressful situations to want to get out of harm's way as soon as possible and figure it out afterward. The problem is that by leaving prematurely without covering a few checkmarks and asking a few questions, we’re likely to be even more exposed when other team members need additional details that we haven’t asked for.

It’s a business

Advertising is the business of improving our client’s business through creativity: advertising or other.  Because we don’t see how closely linked creativity and business can be, we tend to minimize the importance of taking an interest in what our clients do. While we’re not expected to know our client’s index share by heart (at least not at first), it’s good to have some knowledge about their business. That knowledge will help you be a true partner and problem solver for your client and it is that kind of relationship that will help the agency in the long run.

While the advertising business and landscape are changing daily, a lot of the realities of an account coordinator remain the same. Depending also on the size of the agency, you may have a different rapport with the creative product which I know is what a lot of new coordinators value. However, I would say that the most important branding and piece advertising you work on is yourself. Brand yourself as a reliable account coordinator that is helpful, detail-oriented, resilient. Work on developing those skills and showcasing them on the day-to-day.

Beyond that, it’s important to constantly be in contact with your direct report to gauge what they expect from you.