The Death of an Account

Knowing your account is going away in a few months is like the doctor telling you how long you’ve got to live.  Hold on, wait to see where I am going with this.

Now I am not particularly in-love with my account.  I do like it despite its challenges and truth be known, it is by far the nicest client I’ve worked with in a very long time.  I believe in the product and I am genuinely rooting for them to succeed.

However, my life is not necessarily on the line.  I mean I won’t go suicidal for the loss of this account.  However, inching my way into work through traffic this morning, it dawned on me that route would no longer be familiar to me in just a couple of months.  I will no longer curse at the same road for being under construction at the most inopportune times –mainly when I am running late.  I will no longer greet my parking floor with “what the f—” when another car beat me to my favorite parking space and I won’t race to the elevators still hoping to make my daily morning meeting just in the nick of time.  That routine will be over by the time summer is in full effect.

Then as I sit in the doldrums of our daily status and listen to the debates about how we are going to address a client issue, I become annoyed with these people.

These inane arguments about whether or not something is covered by the contract or if we need a change order for shit that should have been done out of best practice to begin with is just one of the many reasons we lost this account. 

We failed to put the most experienced people on the account, we let an ass-hole incompetent project manager with the maturity of a 5 year-old run amuck with delivery of projects and yet we are still arguing about whether ,what should have been done right to begin with, is within scope?  WTF!

This account was destined to fail from the start.  First this wannabe agency  (run by a bunch of tech consultants and bean counters) hires an ASS for an AD. 

To this day none of us who worked with her in the past can understand how she got through the rigorous interview process.  She lost three major accounts at her previous agency, has a fraction of the category experience required to run this account, is lazy, unimaginative and knows so little about this business all she can mutter in meetings is, “I will have to check on that” or parroting what someone else already said.

Next, they place an incompetent moron as the project manager to handle all the major initiatives of the account.  Oh, to fully appreciate what I am about to write, you need to get a better picture of who I am describing.

Imagine an impish little man wound so tightly he sucks every other sentence out of his mouth back in for fear of how it might sound.  His manner is over the top effeminate and his whining so much worse than a tired five year old at the super market.  His passive-aggressive reproaches are more annoying and mastered to a degree that would put a frigid mid-western wife to shame.  In short, he makes me want to kick his teeth in when he speaks.  His thank yous always sound like fuck yous and his lack of focus or understanding of priorities made him a major account liability –and no one but those of us who worked in real ad agencies ever saw it.

This project manager dropped the ball so many times he would have surely been fired long ago had he been at say, Campell-Ewald, Rubin or Saatchi.  He shoved things he didn’t want to handle or didn’t know how to address under the rug so that everyone including the client forgot about them.  He pretended issues were never brought up mainly because he didn’t want to deal with them and then he complained if what HE thought was right or priority did not move forward (never mind what the client fuckin’ wanted or needed). He would write email rants so acerbic it made me want to reach through his email, grab at his shriveled balls and yank them through the server, pull them up only to shove them back down his throat to shut him the fuck up.

As you can read, this little shit makes me violent with disdain for his inadequate performance.  Why do I care?  Because I resent him and his shrill little voice. 

I resent that I have to be the one to cover for his fucked-up deliveries and to cover for his lack of delivery when I really long to tell the client, “listen this didn’t happen because shit-hole sat his fuckin ass on it so long hoping you’d forget about it then pretended no one ever told him.  He doesn’t know what he’s doing nor what the fuck he’s talking about but pitches a fit so irritating, management would rather shut the door until he’s done. They would rather focus on calming him down than on doing what is right for the account and the project. He’s the one who hates to put schedules together, refuses to commit to any sort of timing and basically thinks he’s the client.  Overall, HE is the little shit responsible for all the failed projects, late deliveries and missed opportunities….but he had help.  Management not only put up with it, they encouraged it by keeping him employed on your account and worst still, employed at the ‘agency.”

Then there is the other AD who is OOO so often we all wonder how he got such a deal.  I mean we all get two weeks vacation and 7 sick days but for having only been employed one year, he has been out 4 weeks-worth of vacation time and eaten through his sick days so quick, we thought he’d have to come in on his death bed.  No such luck on the death bed. 

He has a quick defensive temper, is overtly rude to the client and basically admitted to knowing very little about our discipline but praised his own uncanny ability to bull-shit. He was always running late and often dialed into meetings from his cell on his way into the office or left early ‘cuase he didn’t feel well enough to put in a full-day’s work at the office.

Once the client asked me what he did to which I had no reply simply because I didn’t know.  I could have said (and probably did) that he handles all the behind the scenes dealings of running the business.  As you can see, I am not a good bull-shitter or perhaps I wanted that to be transparent; this AD is a fuckin’ waste of space and the quicker we got rid of him, the better off we all would have been.

Finally, the last thing you do to kill an account is to relegate the most experienced person to mundane daily maintenance projects keeping him so busy that he is not allowed to attend meetings that involve new initiatives, thus a forum for him to provide the kind of real insight the account needs.  Instead, the moronic AD is the lead for your discipline and of course all he brings to the table is “I will check on that.”

So when we got the word the account went up for review, was anyone really surprised?  No, no… REALLY?  Didn’t the fact that almost a for a whole year, I sent numerous warning emails, voiced concerns and made suggestions to improve our client relationship tip anyone off?

That, in short, is just a sampling of how you kill an account.

 

 

 

 

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