The Lost Pillar of Advertising

In many agencies today, account management has been reduced to a shadow of its former self. Much of what once defined the discipline has migrated into strategy. From the outside, management consultancies are taking their share of the pie. On the inside, what remains are mostly project managers and account directors—people with little real influence. Daniel Adolph, once an agency managing director and now an independent consultant—and my guest in episode #104—calls account management “the lost pillar of advertising.”
During his time at Jung von Matt, he grew critical of strategy’s rise, which in his view siphoned off the strategic thinking that used to belong in account management. One of his core beliefs: “Too many strategists make account management dumb.” Everything that requires real thinking, he argues, gets pushed into strategy. Those who want to think leave account management. And in the end, the only ones left are the pushers—the people who simply keep the machinery running.

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The role itself has withered—even in larger agencies. To paraphrase Jean-Remy von Matt, the essence of being an account manager has been lost: you can only be called an adviser if you actually have advice to give. How many account managers still provide genuine counsel? Much has eroded—both in self-perception and in performance. Daniel sees ample room for improvement, particularly in smaller agencies, where project management often overshadows substantive engagement with the issues at hand.
As someone deeply driven by content and ideas, Daniel also notices a similar shortcoming in many pitches. Time and again, agencies give little attention to what is actually being asked of them. The brief is usually spelled out clearly in the invitation—yet often goes unanswered. Instead, agencies default to their standard playbook—and frequently stumble over the basics.

In the agency business, the human factor still plays—and will continue to play—a decisive role. Relationship management between client and agency remains one of the key issues. In any pitch, beyond the substantive questions, it always comes down to whether the client trusts the agency people to solve their problem—and whether they actually want to solve it with them. The proverbial question is: does the chemistry feel right?
That’s the purpose of so-called chemistry meetings. But too often, Daniel finds the credentials presented to be interchangeable. Awards matter to clients only if it’s an Effie—because that’s about impact. Otherwise, what counts is presence in the market and what an agency can contribute to solving the problem—not the famous “golden idea” created for the local swimming pool.
He identifies another sea of sameness around data competency. Here too, the slides tend to look alike—often including references to The Long and the Short of It, a study now more than a decade old. Agencies like to talk about working with data they don’t actually have access to in practice, such as sales data.
For Daniel, the way out of this interchangeability lies in a clear link to the task at hand and the client’s situation. A case study should always correspond directly to the client’s specific problem. An agency becomes interesting when the client sees that it has truly engaged with their unique context.

In a pitch presentation, the client’s main contacts should each have clearly defined roles. These are the people the client watches closely and must be able to imagine working with in the future—or not. The role of managing directors, however, can be tricky. If they show up only as figureheads, they’re useless. But if, at the other extreme, they’re the only ones speaking, the presentation becomes dull and the team effectively disappears.
This brings us back to account management—its role and its function. What do account managers contribute beyond project management? Nothing against project management—it’s essential for every agency’s survival. But clients also need advisers they can engage with substantively, people they can turn to for guidance. Agencies shouldn’t hand this territory over to outsiders, nor should account managers simply cede it to strategists.
At the end of the day, agencies exist to solve their clients’ problems. Till Diestel, Chief Creative Officer at Serviceplan, once put it this way on this podcast: he doesn’t talk about making advertising; he talks about solving clients’ problems. That’s the point. Solving problems has value—and, ultimately, a price. Agencies won’t earn much with small, funny ideas. This is partly a problem of language, but also of mindset. It leads agencies to sell themselves short and slide into commodity status.
Many creatives, Daniel argues, are too enamored with ideas—a tendency that often results in overserving, delivering more than was asked for. He also laments the disconnect between awards and reality: competitions increasingly reward irrelevant ideas. The best creative idea only has value if it solves a client’s problem. At this point, clients have, in his view, largely lost their bearings in the agency market. They no longer know who can actually solve their problems. And it’s not always the big names.

Clients’ compulsive attempts to squeeze the very last drop out of agencies don’t make things any better. There has to be a financially healthy path forward for everyone involved. The moment a client celebrates pushing an agency down by 20 percent on price, they should realize that the team they just saw presenting will no longer be the same. Otherwise, the agency would be facing a profitability problem.
Daniel refers to what he calls the 3:30 rule: clients fight tooth and nail for a 3 percent discount, yet better leadership and treatment of the agency would yield 30 percent more performance. With clear feedback, trust, a positive spirit, freedom from fear, transparency, clarity, and aligned goals, you can get far more out of any agency—and the wonderfully eccentric people who work there—than you could ever save on the cost side.

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A logical consequence of this thinking is saying goodbye to traditional payment models. With rising costs, an hour of work cannot simply get cheaper. Debating this point only throws unnecessary sand into the gears of the client–agency relationship. Finding new models that properly recognize the value of agency services is a central task—for agencies and for the industry as a whole.
On the client side, Daniel calls for more courage and the competence to actually assess the impact of communications measures. Otherwise, companies tend to default to the safest route—and with it, to interchangeable work. To avoid that, agencies also need more courage, combined with a simple filter: Would I do this if it were my own company?