Welcome to episode 93. If you’re working in creative agency account management you know how essential it is to have a positive relationship with your creative director built on trust.
I asked Creative Director, Joey Tackett, to join me and discuss what’s most important to him about working with account managers so we can see account management through the lens of the creative team.
Joey shares:
- The key skills he believes AMs need to be respected by their creative team
- Where the relationship can break down and why
- How he diffuses tension between the AM and creative team
- Some useful tips for making your client presentations more impactful I hope you enjoy the insights from my chat with Joey and pick up some tips to help you in your account management role.
If you want to develop your account management skills, be seen less as an order taker and more like a consultant by your clients, then check out the details of my 9 week Account Accelerator and 1 week Account Booster programmes.
Transcript:
00:00 Jenny Plant
Today, I have Joey Tackett. Joey is an award-winning creative director, coach and speaker who helps agency leaders and consultants become confident and persuasive presenters. During his 23-year career, he has led creative teams at various sized agencies, working on brands such as Target, Southwest and CVS Health. He now leads, in his own agency called Hey Joey Studio, based in sunny LA. Welcome, Joey.
00:32 Joey Tackett
Thank you so much. Yes, it’s not so sunny in LA today, but normally it is, and so happy to be with you.
00:39 Jenny Plant
I can imagine. So, Joey, just give us a flavour of your background and your experience, particularly through the lens of working with account managers.
00:49 Joey Tackett
Thank you so much for having me. I’m super excited about this conversation because I have worked with account managers, dozens and dozens of them throughout my career. But I’ll give a quick backstory of how I got here so people understand what I do. I am a visual designer by trade. I also studied journalism. So I started off in the creative space through the lens of content, both text words, video and visual design and that’s how I came up the ranks in creative. I think it’s important to bring that to bear, to bring that to the conversation because there are different types of creative directors, some of which don’t come up through the ranks. They are more business minded and they are coming at creative with a different perspective. So I think it’s worth noting in our conversation, I do the work, I know how to do the work. I’m the one that’s jumping in at the 11th hour and helping people if needed. So that’s worth noting, and so I have worked at various sized agencies throughout my years as well as running my own business two different times. I did a smaller freelance business about 15 years ago and the reason I jumped out of that was I wanted to get back into larger agency settings where I could learn the things we are going to talk about today. Those projects just were not being built underneath my own umbrella and I knew that I needed to be popped into some projects, into some bigger teams. That was a huge great decision for me because it introduced me to so many great people and completely got me to where I am now. And now I’m back out on my own with Hey Joey Studio doing more bespoke projects.
I am still doing creative consulting, I am still doing video production and all those things, logos etc, but I am also passionate about what we are talking about today, mentoring both creative people that work in the creative space to just make them more confident and ultimately create a better client experience. So that’s what I’m really passionate about today after having done this for 23 years.
02:29 Jenny Plant
Amazing. I know that you are going to share so many kinds of valuable insights. So let’s start off by just getting your views on the following. What do you think is the most valuable contribution account managers bring to the creative process?
02:43 Joey Tackett
Yes, great question and I’m going to presume. I know I have listened to a lot of your episodes, and I have worked with account managers as well. I know no one approaches account management quite the same. A lot of agencies are different. So that being said, I understand that some of you listening, you may just be doing account relationships, some of you may be doing project management as well, which I have worked with both types. Some people don’t know exactly what the account manager role consists of. It’s sort of a catch all term. So I wanted to put that out there, that I have seen all of those things and hopefully we can touch on some of those different buckets today. But at a high level, these things, I think, matter across the board, no matter which category you are in that I just described. So both understanding the client, which is the key part of the job, but also understanding your creative professionals as well.
So it’s a two parter. I think that’s really big, understanding what you care about, what your ethos is with regard to how you approach creativity, what you need from the account manager. I think that’s really important, and I think
I have seen some situations where account managers stop at the client, they are very much advocating for the client, which is the job. A key part of it though, to get there and to be successful, you really need to understand the team you are working with as well, because then we can work together. So I think that’s a big thing that some account managers have not come in the door with, in agencies I have worked at and I have had to sort of coach them on that to help them understand. If we listen to each other, we are going to create a better relationship.
So I think that’s the first one, understanding each other, both the client and the professional.
And then also then realizing this opportunity is huge, this opportunity to build an amazing client experience that’s massive and that involves a lot of things, I think a lot of times when we get busy, I have done this myself as well and I have seen account managers do it. They have too many accounts. The bottom line is screaming in our faces, the business metrics are screaming at us and a lot of times the client experience gets left behind. I mean, there’s this idea of relationship building, which is one thing, but what about all the experiences every time you are meeting with the client, the strategy sessions, how to really bring your team to those meetings in the most powerful way possible. So I think that is the biggest thing that account managers can bring to the table. So it’s being part of that role, leading that, but also bringing the group together, that’s when stuff really is magical.
05:06 Jenny Plant
So true. Often I speak to hundreds of account managers and many complain that there’s too many things going on. They are spinning multiple plates. So you have captured very well the scenario. So can you share some personal experiences where you have collaborated closely with an account manager or an account management team? And what was it for you that made that collaboration successful? Because I think it’s important that everyone hears it from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.
05:38 Joey Tackett
Yes and I should say that if you have not learned already on the podcast, in terms of my style as a creative director, I come at things with empathy. I think empathy is really important, and so I am always looking for ways to help people grow. So I am going to share the experience from how I have solved the problem, but keeping in mind that you may be working with creative professionals that do not have that skill or it’s not top of mind or honestly, they just may be creatives that are not super social, and they are not easy to work with. So I do not want to presume this is going to work for you. You may have a more challenging situation if the team is not willing to meet you where you are. That being said, I do think when things have been really amazing,
I am thinking of one particular account manager that I worked with actually more recently and this account manager had worked, I think, at smaller agencies before they got dropped into the agency situation that we were in together and really understood how creativity worked, even though this account manager was not a creative professional individually. This idea of understanding the strategy, what went into making things possible and the most important thing is, this AM listened to what we said, understood what was important to make the creative, to honour the creative solution and to really make sure the client was happy.
So this understanding that they needed us to really be there to make this possible. So what that actually, tangibly, looked like was in a successful situation, a trust was built. So we trusted this account manager to speak to the client on our behalf because we understood that this AM got what we cared about. So a couple things, like, for example, we want to make sure the integrity of the creative work is there, that you understand what changes we can’t make.
If we make these certain changes, it’s going to uproot the creative integrity, things like that, or also knowing when to bring us in. So being able to be that frontline person and where it’s not, as the creative, I have to be on every call to make sure I am staking my claim and to understand looking out for my best interests, it’s more, no, we trust each other. So there was that sense of understanding, and it came from listening. We saw that throughout the relationship, every time we trained on something, or we talked about something new it became part of the AM’s journey and how they approached the work. I think that’s really massive. So themes there are listening to each other, being intuitive, really valuing that we are in a team together and it’s not just the account manager’s decision and that we have to take orders from the account manager and I think that is really important because it created this symbiotic relationship and all the entire team, not just myself, all the creatives and all of the other people on the teams. Because in some cases were on a ten-person team, a five-person team. Everyone was so excited to work with this AM because there was a sense of trust that was built.
08:34 Jenny Plant
Interesting, love that. I suppose that particularly if, for example, Joey, you as the creative, were not going to be presenting the work yourself, for example, the account manager needed to go to that meeting, to the client meeting, on their own, with the creative work. Then you felt confident that they had really absorbed the strategy from your perspective, the context the things that could be changed, couldn’t, and why it would work, and I suppose what you are saying is that’s what built the trust, because you trusted them to listen to you and to transfer the information to the client. Would you say that is the exception to the rule? Or do you think that generally account managers are pretty much – be honest.
09:21 Joey Tackett
It’s the exception, and I find that the account managers that are listening today, that whether it’s your current role or your previous one, where you are juggling project management tasks or maybe you are at a smaller agency, or you are at a chaotic agency, both of which exist and your job is not clearly defined, that creates a nightmare situation for everyone involved because you are juggling too many tasks and jumping between them. You have talked about this on many of your episodes, so I won’t go into all of that detail. But juggling those tasks are very different because relationship building and talking at a high level, a visionary level is just a different side of your brain than this. Tactical checking, spelling, doing all of these types of things. And I think when you ask an account manager to do both of those at the same time, it creates a really stressful situation and in turn that stress gets projected onto everyone on the team because there’s the sense of nothing’s being done quite well.
They are running between things and as you know, when we lose patience with our team members, it becomes really problematic because we start seeing the worst sides of ourselves. So I think that is the case that has happened in the past. Though I do have an example of another account manager that I worked with that had been doing this a long time and I had to do some coaching in this situation because we were running into some problems where, how do I say this in a way that helps you capture what was going on?
There was a sense of paper pushing happening by this account manager. It was more, I am doing the relationship thing. I have too many projects and I am not looking at anything that’s coming through, and part of this role was project management as well. So in the sales process, for example, we ran into a huge amount of problems because the team was extremely busy. I am the one working, also supporting business development, and I ended up carrying a lot of the weight of that project, things that the account manager, in my mind, should have been doing, and in fact, was part of that job description. So that was very problematic.
But I think when calling it out and explaining, listen, it’s not that I am above this work or that you are above this work. It’s more when we look at when we get very busy, we need to understand which roles we are serving, because somebody needs to be serving all of these roles. And what I find is a lot of times the account people and this happens for project managers, too, or account managers wearing the project manager hat, the creative work is just more fun. It’s more fun than doing proposal writing sometimes and dealing with budgets and whatever. And I think it’s very easy for them to get consumed in the creative bullpen in theory, if you are in person or in the zoom sessions, because it’s more fun to talk about colours and fonts and expression. So I think it’s just this natural thing. They get sucked into what we are doing, and then in turn, there’s five people doing the work that three people should be doing, and no one’s checking spelling, no one’s writing the proposal, no one’s really looking at the budget. And I think that was the example where I had to say here that we are really busy and I need you to do the tasks no one else is doing, what you are doing. Things like checking the name of the client in the proposal, making sure it’s correct, making sure that we were not asking them for things we already had, stuff like that and I felt that was problematic, that I had to bring that up. But again, what I did do, and I’ll share this now, and maybe we can talk more in detail, the way that I like to do this is how I approach creative projects as well.
It’s never a good situation in my experience in the agency world, or any life for that matter, to create me against you situation. So it’s my opinion against yours, Jenny, we are fighting our battles, and it’s all about us and who’s going to win, because in the client world, the client needs to win you know and it’s not really about my ego or your ego or what we care about at that point. For example,
when I am working on a branding project, for example, which is obviously a big agency deliverable, I never make it about, we like this, and the client likes that. It’s always more about what do their clients care about? They are hiring us to solve a problem for their user, their buyer, their customer and when we do that what it does, it diffuses the conversation because we are talking about this objective third party over here that has opinions and they matter more than ours. I think that trifecta makes a lot of sense and I have tried to apply that to the account manager, project manager and creative role as well. It’s not about me and you fighting, it’s more, we care about what the client cares about, and ultimately, we all care about who’s buying their product, right? Or who’s engaging in their website or whatever the outcome is. I think if we remember that, it diffuses the conversation.
So in this particular example, I had to say that, I had to say we have done a lot of really great strategy work with this client, we need to make sure that they know that we remember what we did, and we need this proposal to reflect everything that we decided on with them so that they felt like we were paying attention. Does that resonate? And feel free to ask any questions on that, but that’s how I have approached it, not making it me against the account manager, because it never is.
14:21 Jenny Plant
I think it’s a great concept. Just let’s take the focus off us. What is the outcome that the client is trying to achieve for their customer and that, as you say, diffuses anything. We are talking about this goal over here, which has got nothing to do with the dynamic between us. So I think it’s a really good point well made. I wanted to talk to you about what you touched on a little while ago, which was adding value to the process, because personally, I have worked with lots of creative directors, and one of the biggest complaints that I have heard is that an account manager is not adding value to the process and particularly, as you said, if they are wearing two hats and they are project management focused and they are very under pressure, it becomes like you said, you use the word paper pushing exercise. I know I’m going to take the concept or the first draft or whatever and just send it to the client. Like, I am not checking anything. I am not looking at it through a different lens to everybody else. I am not going back with any questions before I send it off. It’s all about speed and efficiency. Is that resonating with you? You are nodding furiously, so I presume that’s resonating.
15:27 Joey Tackett
Yes, absolutely and I think agencies that really are missing big opportunities in this space are ones that are not trying to fix this problem because it’s easy to live in this chaos world, this chaotic land, and say, this is just how the agencies run. This is who we are. Get on board or go somewhere else. True, we are making it work. Things are happening, but it’s three times the amount of stress for everyone and the client ultimately is paying the price of this. Either they are getting work that’s not as good as it could be, or, they are paying more and not knowing it, depending on how the agency figures out how to pay for this. But in turn, I think the account manager role is also frustrating when they do not feel they know what their role is either. And I think that’s true. I mean, throughout the years of various agencies I’ve worked at, it’s been questioned. It has always been a question of what is the role? It has been redefined several times, agencies I have worked at, they have moved things on the plate and off the plate, and the level of business development support, where that falls, who’s in charge of business development? There’s all these questions, and I think as a staff member, a leader on the agency team, being client facing, it’s very hard when your position keeps changing, when your expectations keep changing. So I think, again, with a view of empathy, I can understand the frustration and I think this is more a message to people that are managing the account teams. How can you fix this for your agency? How can you really think about what we are talking about today and understand that if we make a really positive work experience here, everyone’s going to win and ultimately the client’s going to win.
So this starts to translate to some of the other things I talk about as you spoke in the beginning with the various things I have worked on, and also this idea of helping people build confidence. This is it. This idea of the account manager going in with a confident stance and feeling like they are building a strong trust relationship with a client. This supports that because they know what their job description is, and they also know then how they can excel at the job description. I think that’s really important. So it’s all about building trust at the end of the day because then the client spends more money with us. That’s what we want. We want them to be successful because ultimately they are going to hire us for more things and it’s going to be a long-term relationship. So I think the account manager is obviously central to that. Does that resonate – the lack of clarity?
17:44 Jenny Plant
I am going to come back to your points about building confidence and having a strong stance and presenting yourself, because I know that’s an area that you excel at. So I am really keen to get your tips on that, but I just wanted to revisit the previous point that you said because, again, one of the things that I hear from team members or I have in my past, is what does the account manager do anyway? What are they actually doing? They wear multiple hats and if you listen to my past episodes, I have got a very clear process. But I think it’s important not just for the account manager to have KPIs, but also for everyone in the agency to understand exactly what their role is and going back to the sign off process and as work passes through the account manager, I don’t know about you, Joey, I know that you have got a load of experience working with agencies, but I think the bigger agencies, the bigger network agencies I’ve worked with, do that really well.
They have a very defined sign off process where every role that is mandated to sign it off needs to look at the work through the lens of their hat, their role. So I think process is really central to that. I am going to jump on now to what you just said, which was building confidence, a strong stance. Can you talk to us a bit about these presentation tips and ways that you coach people in how to hold themselves and how to present themselves? Because I think I can see from the way you are presenting yourself, it’s very impactful. But how can you translate some of the stuff that you know for the audience?
19:22 Joey Tackett
Right, that is a great question, a great one and I can build on some of the themes that I have used in various trainings. Very specifically, the one that I created more recently, earlier this year, which I’m excited about, is called the Creative Pitch Masterclass and it focuses on helping people learn how to sell specifically creative work or creative visionary work, if that makes sense, or selling a vision for what a PROWA problem could be solved. That’s ultimately what it’s talking about. But it’s through the lens of creativity and the creative agency and it was really great in this course because I know what resonated with people and I can share some of those things now of what was really big AHA moments for people that did not know how to do this and various people were in the first cohort, it was not just designers, it was people doing account work, project managers, people that were peripheral to this creative design process that a lot of people think of.
So I wanted to reference that by saying it is important and everyone’s a key part of that. So I believe everyone plays a role in that client experience, everyone that’s client facing, and even people that are not, they are building that experience for the client because they do not pick and choose who they are listening to. If we think about all the experiences they have with us, they are looking at all the touch points, they are looking at the emails, they are looking at even our marketing material as the agency. They are really dissecting things and building this perception based on us. I think what we can control, though, is at the account manager and team level, imagining you are at a large agency, you do not control the marketing of the agency. What you can control is what I care about. You can control what you say to those clients every time you are communicating with them and remembering.
I start off the master class with this in mind. It’s not even about presentation skills to start. It’s about understanding your client inside and out and account managers are going to have a great, I think, experience doing this. I can certainly share some more questions as part of the show notes, if that’s good for you, about some of the other questions I like to ask. But it’s digging into things like understanding their life as much as they are willing to share with you, understanding their family if they are willing to share that with you. Where do they go to school? What do they care about? What is making sure that they keep job security intact? What are their visions as client professionals going forward? I think understanding all those things is important, but it’s not just important for the account manager and this is a job that the account manager can actually own. They are building this primer along with everyone else. They are managing this document or it’s in salesforce or wherever you put it, and it’s in there and now here’s the key difference that I like to do. The account manager can lead this meeting as well. Before big project check ins, even before even smaller ones, when a team might be going in front of a client or even if they are going on individually. Review the primer. Read it like you would a morning meditation, if any of you do meditation, or affirmation statements, it’s the same concept because you forget you have eight clients or ten clients, you forget what this client actually cares about and then when you can feel it, then you start to frame your conversation differently because you remember, oh yeah, they care about this, they love that. You can name drop things; you can drop topics they care about.
That goes a long way and I think that’s what gets thrown out the window when we get very busy. So that’s one tip that I like. It’s this primer, or almost like this client POV as I call it, the point of view. It’s like where they are coming from and then ultimately, then we can map that point of view to the client presentations. That’s where the confidence gets built. So let’s say your account manager is going in and doing even an informal presentation. Let’s say they are doing an onboarding, or we are doing a discovery session where we are learning things about the client. Now they have much more confidence because they are able to go in and understand, here’s what we have learned so far. Here’s what I want to learn about the client. I’m going to ask really good questions and then we are building out this primer, right? now when you get to the big important things, there is always a first big reveal, it’s a new client. There’s always a thing that you are revealing, it’s whether it’s the big pitch, not the pitch, I’m sorry, post pitch, this is an awarded contract. It’s the big website reveal, it’s a strategy reveal, it’s a logo design, whatever it is, that is like the mountaintop experience for the client and that needs to go perfectly as much as you can, as close to perfect as possible so you need all players on deck for this. And so you have the primer, you are reviewing that. Then also, I go into in the class as well and I’m happy to dig into more that you find interesting here on how to curate the content based on those interests. So for example, when we are creating a website, maybe there’s one, two or three concepts could be true for a logo as well, or a strategy approach. That is the way that I have trained people, the way that I have done it for my entire agency life.
That entire presentation to you is tailored for you. It is organized. It is curated based on what we care about second, first, is what you care about. So for example, you are worried that the website is going to break because the last time you worked on a website project, it broke and you got in trouble or whatever. That’s scary for people. We want to make sure that never happens again. So the entire presentation is framed through that lens. So the concepts are great, they are good, that’s cool. They will speak, but they don’t speak for themselves. We want to translate to you why that really matters and so the account manager is key for this process because you do not have to be the person that designed the solution, you need to be a representative for the solution. So hopefully that gives you some insight in some of the steps.
So the way that I broke the masterclass out was actually that it was thinking like your client. The next step is curating. So it’s really about connecting the dots and bringing the features that you added to the solution together with what they care about and the third is really just building that narrative structure and then the presentation or the conversation or the narrative starts to sell itself.
25:09 Jenny Plant
Very interesting, very nice. So their job is to gather the information to really learn about the client, to ask right questions, gather the insight, then develop this primer that informs the style, the content, the flow, the look and feel, the impact, how it’s presented and the story for delivering that solution. What feedback do you get from people? Do people say, because I’m thinking in my head, okay, this is a very thorough approach. Okay, so no doubt that some account management managers might say, I do not have time to do that. How do we help them overcome that challenge?
25:52 Joey Tackett
Yes, it’s a good point because almost everyone that I have worked with is busy beyond measure, myself included, on projects. I think it’s like a good exercise routine, which I know we all maybe love to hate and love at the same time, or a diet, or maintaining anything in our businesses or lives where we want to see steady progress, right? I think it’s the same here. So it’s not that you have to spend way too much energy in this. I think it’s more understanding the milestones that I just described to you. So understanding what you are doing and at least doing it in some bare bones way, because you do not have to spend three hours doing this primer. It’s more having the intention to do it. That’s the key. So, for example, even when I have got very busy and I do this with almost everything, including interviews like this or whatever, I always take a moment before the meeting and
it’s easy on Zoom because you are at your computer, to shut my eyes and sort of just think about for even 30 seconds. This is why I am here. This is what we are doing. We are here to make the client feel we are building trust with the client, and we are here to make them understand how what we are sharing today is going to revolutionize how their workflow is. And so when you say that, it took me, what, 10 seconds to say, I feel excited now to tell you about how we are going to do that. And I think it’s that. So it does not have to be an hour. It could really be a 30 second centering activity that you and your team does going in. I think that’s big. Another thing you can do, another tip that I harp on all the time and what I talk a lot about in this master class is the agency row loves running things to the last minute.
We love doing 11th hour pitch presentations and everything is so last minute and though I understand how we get there, and I understand that, yes, you can do a good presentation in that, it is way better when you are not running to the last minute. So I present this whole process where it’s run your crazy work mode earlier in the process so that’s five days or five weeks, it can condense. But you want to do it earlier in the process because you do not want to be thinking about it right up until the moment I get on here with you, that I am literally just been printing off things and saving files because it makes you frantic. And it shows on everyone’s face. So I think those are two things that could be really powerful. And I have often worked with account managers and project managers that do hold our feet to the fire on this, to say we must see the work the day before.
Therefore, it creates this milestone check in. And now the team can switch their thinking from creating, which I talk about in the class, to curating to then actually selling or pitching the idea. Those are three different phases or three different hats that people often wear, or it could be three different roles in your agency. So the person that’s actually curating the presentation needs to have a very objective view on, I’m not emotionally connected to these concepts. We need to pitch it to the client in the right way. And so they are being very critical. There’s analysis there and the selling is completely different. I can tell you from experience, when I have gone into presentations, whether by myself or with teams, when we have been working on it up until that morning, it’s crazy, it’s not good. You sound frantic. No one knows how to help each other and support their messaging because you didn’t have time to craft it. So that’s my guidance. Two tips there that I think people could do quickly because we are never going to be perfect. It’s not that you need to spend three weeks training before this and do it perfectly every time. It’s more about the intention.
29:24 Jenny Plant
Love it. What are your general principles about presenting? You have talked about the primer, getting the tone right, the look and feel, the impact, the message. But in terms of presentation skills, what are your principles? Is there a certain length that you think is usual? Who presents, who does not? What tips can you share from your experience of doing this?
29:52 Joey Tackett
Yes, that’s a great question. And I realize some people listening may not have the ability to change some of these things. So I totally understand that. I realize some agencies are mandated from above, outside of the account manager level, that they do take junior staff into meetings, some don’t. Some take one person, some take five. There are different methodologies for agencies on how they approach that, and I respect all of the methodologies. The one that I believe works best is when you bring more people to the table and give more people on the team a chance to represent the narrative that you are presenting to the client. Because number one, it gives people a chance to learn and grow. It takes the pressure off of the account manager or the creative director and you can mentor them after the meeting, you can teach them ways that they can help you.
In turn, now the client has five people to build trust with, not just two or one and you have probably seen this as well in all of your work. Sometimes clients just gravitate to one person over another and that’s cool, that’s fine. I think if you can get that connection going, then the account manager can work with that. It does not push them out of the way more, it creates a harmonious relationship. So therefore, if the trust is built with the developer, which often happens in projects I mentioned earlier, where the website came off the rails and they are freaking out, they want to talk to the developer, they want to talk to the technical project manager. They don’t care as much about the visual design. Okay, fine. Let’s stack the room with the account manager and the technical conduit, whomever that is, someone that can speak well about it and that’s how we would stage those meetings. Whereas if it’s a design focused presentation, we are doing more design focused things. I think that’s really important. So if you didn’t already gather this from what I just shared, what I like to do with the actual presentation itself. This is speaking more when you are an account manager running a team and then I can round out with an individual tip as well. But this is about you orchestrating the actual meeting or the actual presentation. It’s thinking of it like a show, like a Broadway show. If you have seen a play or even movies do this to some degree. It’s the idea of staging. So just because someone made something does not mean they have to speak about it. I don’t believe in that model that it’s like you created the concept, Jenny, you are going to speak about yours and I am going to speak about mine, because it makes the client associate it with us and now they are making one of us sad.
I have associated you with purple and they like purple, but they don’t like red and mine is red. Right? So now they don’t want to tell me no and so it’s too intertwined. I think it’s really great when you can come in and say, we believe this, and then now you speak to the things that the client’s going to hear from you and I’m going to speak to the things that the client are going to hear from me. So features, for example, we will often decide, okay, the account manager is going to speak about the strategy and frame the intro. Then I’m going to talk about the vision of the creative work and then the designer is going to talk about the typefaces and colour. You get the idea. And so that’s awesome because now you are building trust through the lens of these very specific features and also these very specific skills. It’s amazing because now the client can ask specific questions. But the most important thing is more people get in front of the client, more people grow, more people learn, and I believe you share this with me that’s good. That’s what we want in our agency life.
33:09 Jenny Plant
I think it is good. I think there’s two schools of thought on it. Having worked in different agencies, some agencies decide to send the A Team to win the business. So of course they are your top presenters. Send in the A team, they will close the business and come back. I think also, Joey, I have this love hate relationship with the way we do business because I think it’s as much about having a conversation as it is pitching ideas. I think a lot of us are addicted to the pitch. We have all done all-nighters, the big reveal, which is great and it’s exciting, but at the same time, I have been there enough to know that it’s this business model that we have where we are selling our highest value thinking, and I think we do not qualify business opportunities enough. So it’s probably one step before what we are talking about now. But I think that’s probably another conversation with you. But I also wanted to go back to your views on the no, nos. You have had enough experience working with agencies throughout the year and agency account managers throughout the years, to know when things really irk you and upset you or it’s not going to be a good outcome. Talk to me about that, we have talked about the paper pushers, the ones that do not have value. They are not bringing anything to the party. They are too busy to really engage. They are not listening. What else are the no-no’s that every account manager listening should be taking note of?
34:42 Joey Tackett
Great question. Thank you for asking and it leads to what I have talked about actually on some other podcasts recently and in other content I have created, which is it’s really down to ego. And I’m going to say what I mean. And ego affects all of us, right? In any role, it could be the CEO. Creative people are notoriously branded and intertwined with the word ego. In many cases, it’s just the nature of the business. Some people perpetuate that, some people want to run from it. But you have seen this. I mean, there’s this feeling of whatever drives it. There’s a sense of self-importance and a sense of, I am not a team player, I am actually the star of the team, and you should know that. So that’s a bad vibe. But that also can play out, I think, for account managers, too, and other leaders on the team, when there’s this feeling of, it’s not my job, that’s your job. Or also this is a big one, and you asked me to be honest. So I’m going to say some of the things I’ve heard before with some really challenging account managers. “Well, great, thanks for your ideas, this is my client, and I will figure out what we are going to show”, things like that. Or coming in and saying, “yeah, I love what you did, Senior Managing Director, Creative” whatever title I have, where I am thinking, am I going to have to throw the title around to remind them that my opinion matters here as well? And you are telling me what great job on the concepts. These are the ones we are showing. So they kind of put on this creative director role, and that’s totally understandable if it’s framed differently. It’s not that your opinion does not matter. It’s more this authority that you are exerting over the process, which never goes well because that’s not how creative problem solving happens.
So I think the way to frame that would be “yeah, you may feel that you are in that role as an account manager and it is your job to do that, but you have to, I think, remember that the way you say it is really key and also that you are going to get better work if you work with the players involved.” This is true for developers and technologists. This is not just true for creatives, though. I’m speaking through the lens of what I know best, which is that and creativity often gets this gets blurred more because everyone believes they know about colour, everyone believes they know about aesthetic and it’s subjective, or at least they see it as subjective and it’s just not. Hopefully that answers the question, I think, just coming in with that framing of really trying to remove the sense of ego and I talk a lot about that with content I’ve created for creatives as well. I think we need to fight against our ego in the space, because it never ends well. Being the tyrant never works. It just does not. It may feel good in the moment, but it creates a really bad divide in the team, and I just think the client can sense that too. They can sense that we are against each other, or we are fighting. We are not really on the same team.
37:29 Jenny Plant
Love that and I’m really glad that you made that point. I think that was very honest. I have seen it myself and I absolutely, 100%, agree with you. That’s where relationships fall down. At the end of the day, we are a team, aren’t we? So we have to operate as one. What else upsets you about working with account managers or that you have heard of, that you have witnessed?
37:49 Joey Tackett
Well, I think it stems from that same belief. I think it stems from this idea that they are imagining that they are the expert in areas where maybe they are not, or it comes sometimes from a good place. I think if you have a very driven business professional, no matter what role, there’s this hunger to want to really sink your teeth into the job and if you get that type of personality in an account manager role, which is common because it’s a manager, it’s a leader, there can be this feeling of I’m going to figure it out and I’m going to come up with the answers because I do not want to look silly to the client. So in turn, they sort of exert too much expertise because they have not been able to get the answers, or they don’t really want to try to find the answers. I don’t know what the reasoning is. But the point is it creates this sort of strategy person that’s not really equipped to do it and they are shutting out a lot of the people on the team that actually do know the answers and in turn they create a really messy situation because then you have either two options, you sell the client something that’s broken, that does not honour the brand of the organization or, you know, isn’t the best idea because the account manager said it or you backpedal and everyone looks silly. Right? Everyone looks silly. And that’s very challenging to do that. I think we have all probably been in that place whether you meant to get there or not. So that’s why I try to share some ways, I think, of reasons why people get there. But I think as an account manager, it’s more my – hopefully you are working with really positive team members or people that are at least willing to have a conversation and if they are, I think the account manager can speak to the creative director, the younger designers, the younger creative strategists, and just have these conversations and say, help me understand what you care about. Take them out for coffee. What is a good design to you? It’s really cool if you talk about it outside the framework of a project, because then it’s not so polarizing because you are not talking about a specific thing, you are talking in concept. So those are some ways I think that an account manager that may have made these mistakes could turn it around and realize that the client is going to build trust with whomever is in front of them and even if you are convincing, what happens if you are saying the wrong things?
40:04 Jenny Plant
I think everything that you have just said, I think is really true. I mean, you are trying to equally build trust and respect in your team, with your team as well as the client and just all the points that you made, having a curious mindset, listening, learning, being humble, getting to know your internal team is going to help you to build that trust and respect, isn’t it? Your team will pull things out of the bag for you and support you, particularly when we are thrown in situations where we have to pull things around quickly. You are in the business of persuasion, persuading people to help you to get the job done. So, yes, really lovely points there, Joey. Let’s switch gears a little bit because I’m curious to hear from your perspective, you are in LA now, you have got your own business, your studio, what do you see as the future of the creative agency industry? I know it’s a big question, but what are some of the trends you are seeing? Anything that you are noticing around creativity, around agencies in general? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
41:08 Joey Tackett
Yes, I’ll come back to the obvious one, the elephant in the room, because I am in LA, where the SAG after strike is happening with writers and actors. We will come back to that in a moment because I think that’s important, of what’s the impetus for that? But first I’ll start with something that’s not time bound, which was more, I think it started around COVID Pandemic, Lockdown and those things. But I think it was even starting before, which is this, I think it’s a resurgence because I’ve been doing this long enough to know that it comes in waves but there is a resurgence of independent workers, individuals, freelancers, individual consultants, where clients seem to be more open, if not really hungry to work with smaller teams and I think that is big because the agency comes and goes in terms of its popularity of do people want these big agencies of record?
Do they want small? and I feel like now, definitely post pandemic and definitely with Zoom being a possibility to work globally, I think that’s huge. I’m seeing all these cohorts pop up. I’m seeing even agencies exploring that idea of, hey, you want to leave your employment? We will just have you on as a cohort. You will just be an independent contractor, or whatever. That’s way more popular than it was even a couple of years ago and I think the Zoom culture has created that. The Lockdown culture started it, right? So I think that’s big, and I think there’s a huge amount of opportunity there because the agencies have to adapt. But I think the agencies can adapt by doing what I just said, working with individuals, working with smaller teams of specialists that are not on staff, but are able to bring really great expertise to the table.
It is just a huge opportunity for people that want to do their own thing. They have an entrepreneurial vibe, and that’s super exciting. So that’s a trend that I’ve already started seeing pre COVID, but it definitely has continued to perpetuate. And it’s big in Los Angeles, clearly, because this is the land of chasing your dreams, and everyone seems to be doing nontraditional things. So that’s huge. But let’s actually come back to what I just mentioned about. So this writer strike and this actor strike, which is all stemming, obviously, from, not to oversimplify it, but AI, and this idea of the rights around AI and also the role of the creative, the role of the artist in the whole process. I think, though, it’s slightly different for what we are talking about because we are not producing as much fictitious work. Maybe you are. Maybe many of your people are on here that are listening, but in most cases, I think people are probably creating solutions for clients.
It’s in this more real world, right? We are not creating films and things like that, but it still persists in that. There is this belief very quickly, when you look at if you just scroll your social media, I’m sure you see this as well. Ads for AI is going to change the world. AI can create a course for you. AI can make your life better. You do not need to think anymore. It’s going to do all of it for you. So I think clients are going to start believing that or at least starting to question, is that true, and is that possible? And so I think we have to be prepared. This involves the account manager as well. This is not just for the creative team to explain that away. What does that mean? Where is our role? How does AI work in this? How are we monitoring it? So there’s a huge amount.
We could talk to the whole podcast about AI, but I think it’s important to note that I firmly believe that AI is not going to take over the creative space. Like many industries, it’s not going to. But I think we are in this pendulum swing where everyone’s super excited about it being automated and whatever and you can do it, there are ways to do it. It’s like you can go in there and create prototypes and concepts of people in different settings that you could not do before and I think as creatives are leaning into those things, more of how can we use it, but then reminding how can we use it in a way that streamlines the process, but reminding clients that the AI thing, the robot is not a human. It does not have emotions, it has programmed emotions and ultimately, I fundamentally believe, getting back to my presentation, coaching and the passion there, people want to buy from people, at least in our lifetime, where we want to see and I want to see your eye contact, I want to know that you as a human living a similar life to me, believe this is going to work. So there’s that innate sense of trust that comes there that I just don’t see a robot bringing to the table. It’s an algorithm and I think the algorithm can give us insights. So when I look at the creative industry and what is shifting, I think that might be what it is. I think the demand is going to be more for that pitching, that trust building, the account manager trust building. I think that is going to be huge because I think the design community might start to find that clients see them as a commodity for a little while. Like, well, the computer can do it, all my children can go make the concepts you normally would have taken two days to make, so why do I need you? I think hopefully the pendulum will swing back and they’ll remember, oh, yeah, it was better when actually a human did it.
45:55 Jenny Plant
Yeah. There’s a lot of hype at the moment, isn’t there?
45:58 Joey Tackett
Oh, gosh, yes. So I wanted to give my view on it of what I think is happening and also how I’m using it and how people in my community and people I’m working with are using it. And that’s it. It’s more to say it’s not going to take over, but we are in that moment where it’s just the hype. So it’s going to be overly focused on for a while.
46:19 Jenny Plant
I agree. Joey, this has been really enlightening. Thank you so much for everything that you have shared. Who would you like to hear from and what’s the best way of reaching you?
46:29 Joey Tackett
Absolutely, yes, I would love to hear from any of your listeners that want more information, want more help. I am happy to give you more guidance on what I’ve spoken about, of how to work with creative people and how to do those things. So anything I mentioned, I am certainly happy to speak about. I am obviously on LinkedIn, that’s one of the biggest places that I can meet with people, and you can message me on there and also on my website, which is Joey Tackett with two T’s, tackett.com/heyjoey is where you can go to and that gives ways to book a meeting with me to just get some more general information about the next steps. So those are the best ways people can get in touch with me.
47:09 Jenny Plant
Wonderful. We will put all of that in the show notes. Joey, thank you so much for joining me. This has been brilliant.
47:15 Joey Tackett
Definitely. Thank you so much, Jenny.
