Luke is a senior digital account manager at Graphic Alliance. He’s worked here for almost 4 years and, before that, freelanced here as a creative. Below he gives us a good, bad and ugly insight into daily life.
Describe the average day
Most people start with coffee but I’ve never flourished into adulthood enough to subscribe to hot drinks. It often surprises me, when I’m forced to drink something hot, just how good it tastes but it also feels like acceptance of my true age and so I’ve generally abstained.
A good day begins with a plan. A typical day often rewrites that plan as it goes along. A bad day happens to you.
What does it entail?
The beginning and end of each day is the most pivotal. A good day today was generally preceded by a productive yesterday, which ended with sufficient forward planning. A colleague recently told me that the best account managers (organisers of anything, really) work backwards from deadlines and appointments and this is very true. Assuming that box has been ticked, I’ll review and respond to emails before settling into the first of the day’s tasks.
Those tasks can vary greatly from one day to the next, from strategising to speaking with clients to collaborating with teams/individuals (internally and externally) to get stuff done. Maintaining a good relationship with the production team is critical – we are only as good as what they feel inspired and motivated to create, after all.
What shocks a lot of new account managers is the degree to which roles, plural, blur into one and the amount of traditional ‘admin’ that’s required. On the first point, we dance between project management and account management, between strategising and doing. It’s hard work and it’s not the way all agencies choose to approach things, but it does have its positives. You can’t be much more invested in a project than when you touch every element of it.
The ‘doing’ involves some less than glamorous tasks. Whether that’s creating a specification document, preparing a spreadsheet of 301 redirects or reformatting and uploading content.
What parts of your job do you enjoy most and least?
What I enjoy most is fully understanding the challenge, being able to articulate it and then finding an appropriate solution. Many factors contribute towards this, from being fearless enough to both ask the right questions and commit unwaveringly to task, to having the confidence to communicate it in a way that captures people’s imagination and makes them empathetic towards the client’s objectives.
What I enjoy least is, as anyone would I’m sure, is letting a client or a colleague down. It happens and it’s always crappy. The trick is to focus on what can be done about it but that doesn’t make it any less painful. At the very least, the pain proves you care.
What’s the secret to a successful project versus a successful long-term relationship?
Understanding. Interrogating the brief and coming to a mutual agreement on what the solution is. The more often you can expose yourself to your client’s business, the more likely you are to add value – the long-term relationship is a natural consequence of that.
Of course, good planning, good communication, a healthy dose of giving a damn (as our Partners often say) are all important too and cannot be overlooked. However, projects can be catastrophic if by the end you’re still holding up examples saying “is this what you were expecting?”.
The agency has expanded to be full-service, evolving from its core capabilities in website design and development towards a broader offering in terms of marketing. How important is design in the mix these days?
Linford, one of three founding Partners of Graphic Alliance, frequently says that we work with ‘brands who see themselves as brands’. That could be interpreted in many different ways – to me, it means brands who recognise their value and the value they create through design and storytelling.
The single most important person in our agency, in my opinion, is our creative director. Not only is he a visual genius but he sets the tone for all of our projects. He routinely translates the client’s brief better than the client or I could ever hope to and stretches our production teams beyond their comfort zone. These are important qualities if you’re to create work that stands out.
When that vision is complemented by the sort of pragmatic and user-centred people we have at Graphic Alliance, the potential for transformative work is always on the table.
What’s the secret to growth within an agency, in your opinion?
A friend once read a book that said every company needs a ‘way’. A certain means of doing things that everyone subscribes to. I agree wholeheartedly with that statement.
It’s not to say that there’s one correct way of doing things – that’s absurd and assumes we know it all. Rather, there’s a way of getting things done that everyone can contribute to and that keeps things moving in the right direction. New people often bring about new practices – sometimes for the better, other times not. The trick, I think, is to explore those other ways of doing and then adopt and communicate thoroughly the ones that worked.
You do often have to put aside your own methods in favour of what the agency sees as a priority but I don’t see that as a negative, managed correctly.
You also need to care for people. As account managers, you often benefit from a bird’s-eye view of the agency. Routinely, you become HR too. Seeing a change of mood as it happens and acting on it to maintain some sense of harmony.
Having experience of freelancing, agency life and client side, what’s your perspective on the fundamental differences?
There’s the tendency for one to denounce the other – that, fundamentally, is the biggest barrier to good work. Agencies will often say that freelancers are too unreliable and lack the perspective that working in a team encourages. Freelancers will often say that agencies are over-priced and careless. In-house teams often feel threatened by agencies (less so freelancers) and see them less as an extension of their own team and more as an outside expert, critical of their efforts.
The truth is, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. One can either complement or derail the other. When there’s harmony and everyone knows their boundaries, that’s when the best work gets created – it’s only natural. We position ourselves as an extension of a company’s in-house team and we try to go the extra mile to transfer our knowledge to our client. That can sometimes be uncomfortable (and it doesn’t work for everyone). Typically clients look back at a project and can see what they’ve learnt through the process – that has to be a good thing.
In hindsight, what advice would you give to past Luke?
My cousin, who happens to be a Partner here, advised me to set aside technology and learn the principles of things such as colour, typography etc. That was valuable advice that’s transferable across any practice.
Our world is full of acronyms and buzzwords – I’m not against them; that’s simple linguistics. However, a lot of people – myself included – fall foul of understanding the tool and not the problem it should be used to solve. Principles tend not to change – technology evolves every day.
Anyone coming for an interview should be prepared to speak in layman terms. I always think that the most confident among us can speak in terms the listener can understand, often oversimplifying things for sake of greater clarity. That demonstrates a true grasp.
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