A copywriter's love letter to the account team

Stare too long into the watery eye of LinkedIn and you’d be forgiven for thinking you know nothing worth knowing. We are, it seems, very much in the age of upskilling – in which people you couldn’t bear to talk with for the length of a long burp try to sell you a 16-week residential course that will finally fill those debilitating voids in your skillset and character.

We can blame all this on the rampant hyphenation of creative careers, or the side-hustle, or a hangover from the days where we actually believed a Duke of Edinburgh Bronze Award would impress university recruiters, employers, potential life partners and sullen pets. Wherever we point the finger, there’s an inescapable sense in today’s copywriting and creative life that your bow – with its single, lonely string – represents a lack of flexibility or ambition or usefulness.

Except – and archers please do feel free to, figuratively, shoot me down – the proper number of strings in a bow is, surely, just the one. A strong, confident, dependable one, but still just the one.

I tend to dwell on this line of thinking whenever I find myself asked to do something in the copywriting life that is both a.) far beyond my limited capabilities and b.) not really anything to do with copywriting. It’s the kind of introspection that can make you grateful to the people who had the skills (and, let’s face it, the patience) to unburden you of all these things the creative brain is unable, if not always unwilling, to tackle.

I may find myself corrected on this score, but from my very first agency jobs I feel like I knew (and said aloud) that the account team were irreplaceably, inexpressibly essential. I learned how much I needed them in the same way a sailor, thrown overboard, will develop a sudden and unshakeable appreciation for life buoys.

I am lucky enough to have worked with brilliant account people in almost every place I’ve been. The only times I’ve not worked with them are those desperate occasions where, bafflingly, they are not there and you’re left to muddle through as best you can – which, I’ll admit, is a dubious use of the word ‘best’. To return to the ‘overboard sailor’ theme, I’d compare it to attempting to swim through a storm in a pair of fishing waders, while dragging a potato sack filled with fresh chum.

And I’m not simply grateful for account managers – and, I should add, some absolutely extraordinary product marketing managers – doing the things I cannot do or would rather not face, although I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t a part of it. A good account team reads their creatives like a small, tatty, erratic book. They are mystical ‘studio whisperers’ who know the right time to take your side, the right time to pull you back to the path and the right time to kick you in the seat of your corduroy pants.

The account managers I worked with – and treasured working with – thoroughly disabused me of the notion that this industry is made up of creative and non-creative jobs. My best account managers helped drive the creative in a way that I could never reciprocate with the grown-up aspects of producing campaigns for clients. They had imagination and understanding and dynamism and the ability to make stuff happen. I just had imagination. And crisps.

So, when LinkedIn shoves me – with, I must say, increasing neediness – into this or that opportunity to ‘grow my skillset’ I retreat further and further into the one thing I know and do reasonably well. Success in the marketing life, I’m sure, is about assembling the right harmonies of skills, views, energies and characters. Cynically trying to funnel all of that stuff into any one human feels inadequate, and a little sad, in comparison to a team of people helping each other be as good as they can be, at the thing they do best and love most.

But I also spare a thought, and shed a tear, for the creatives who, hoodwinked by a culture of ‘pay less, get more’ will find themselves working without the best friend a copywriter could ever have.

Some copywriting books I’ve written:

Copywriting Is: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter

Adele Writes an Ad