How To Get To Account Director – Some Top Tips

A good senior level friend of mine recently shared his thoughts on how PR consultancy people have to change their mindset at account manager level in order to get to account director level. I thought it was worth sharing here. Its basic stuff, but often the basic things are the ones people forget to tell you…


To reach account manager level in a PR consultancy, you have to demonstrate how effective you are at doing things – from writing that press release and selling it in as an account executive to writing that feature article and managing the campaign tactics for your client as an account manager. You are rewarded for your ability to work hard and deliver results. All well and good.


However, moving on further is all about demonstrating effective thinking.


Your managers want you to continue to do all the other stuff that made you successful but also to think.

• Is what we are doing right now really going to increase sales and change opinion, or do we need a rethink?


• Do I understand the client's business well enough to add value and insight to their communications strategy, or do I need to know more?


• Does my team truly understand why they are doing this activity or is it just another tick on their to-do list?

As an account manager, you’ve already started to learn the skills of team management – mentoring, motivating, assessing resources, teaching best practice, etc. Again, this is all about getting the team to generate results. To become an account director, you must also start ensuring that everyone knows why they are doing this, how it contributes to the big picture and overall strategy for the client. This will instantly make your team more effective. Sounds obvious, but as a recruiter, I frequently meet people below account manager level who don’t have a grasp of that bigger picture and this is often because that hasn’t been filtered down to them.


Of course, with account director level comes a host of other responsibilities including greater financial and budget management, greater resource planning and team management responsibilities, more proactive new business generation and pitch leading.


But boil it all down, and the essence is to demonstrate your potential through thinking.


What my friend suggests is to “take five minutes each morning to decide what you are going to do today to make a strategic difference for your clients or your teams’ development. That five minutes could be the most valuable time for your clients, you and your teams. It will certainly be the five minutes that gets you promoted far more quickly”.


It’s a good point, well made.

The Lack Of Digital Skills

This recent PR Week article, while clearly being a press release – come- cry for help by recruitment consultancies, it raises an interesting issue. It’s hard to fill the now frequent ‘digital expert’ or ‘social media expert’ roles. I see two main reasons for this. Firstly, these people don’t really exist at the moment (at least not in any great number). We’re all learning this stuff, it’s pretty new. Even the ‘digital’ people from pre-2001 were using different tools back then. They didn’t have twitter. This brings us to the second point, that every agency has a slightly different view of what that person is.

What, then, do you want from a ‘digital specialist’?

Usually, the answer is someone who can (1) train the entire consultancy in social media use, buzz monitoring, blog comms, blog discoveries, SMEs, press release SEO (2) lead pitches for and win social media based new business (3) perform the social media function for existing clients and (4) manage all the creative agencies you’ll inevitably have to work with.


Now, isn’t that a rather tall order? I’ve witnessed more than one ‘digital expert’ land a very attractive pay rise with this sort of role, only to burn out in less than six months and to storm out of the building shouting ‘these people just don’t get it!’.

Consultancies really need to be prepared to hire a team, who can perform each of these functions superbly, rather than one person who does a little bit of each. Alternatively, start some heavy investment in some training programmes. It’s going to cost more than the wages of one person, that’s for sure. And with many predicting the death of traditional media within the next year, these skills are essential. At the very least, in my opinion, you need two people. A digital savvy PR person (and there’s lots of those, even if they aren’t ‘experts’) who knows how to deliver the PR message online and also a digital marketing expert. The marketing expert will have all the creative back-end know-how that the PR person simply will not have. Together, they’ll create formidable integrated campaigns.

Furthermore, its becoming apparent that integrated marketing agencies have started snapping up some PR people recently, offering a new breed of complete end-to-end services.

Want online PR? No problem!

Want an integrated marketing and advertising campaign too? No problem!

Want us to design and build bespoke applications for you on Facebook and mobile? No problem!

This has opened up exciting new opportunities for digital PRs to gain new experiences and work in non-PR environments, a desire I’ve frequently encountered when interviewing them. To hang on to these valuable individuals, PR consultancies need to offer a better thought-out role and be prepared for further investment, with an open ear to what your ‘digital expert’ is telling you. After all, isn’t that why you are hiring them?

Why PR Has Benefited From The Recession

Clients across technology and consumer PR are both saying that they are all ‘pitching like mad’ and some are ‘winning business hand-over-fist’. Of course, they need staff to service this, and so far, at all levels.

This is all further encouragement for an industry that seems not only to have survived the recession, but even managed to expand during it. In January, The Economist wrote a very good article discussing this.

It kicks off with some great stats:

According to data from Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS), a private-equity firm, spending on public relations in America grew by more than 4% in 2008 and nearly 3% in 2009 to $3.7 billion.

The key reasons proposed by The Economist are

1. An increase in corporate demand – to counter a media backlash over undeserved bonuses and government bail-outs


2. PR firms dominate control of word-of-mouth marketing/ social media tools


3. PR is often cheaper than mass advertising campaigns


4. PR’s impact can often be more easily measured


5. Dwindling traditional media = fewer journalists = easier to target

While points 1 and 5 are a little by-the-by I feel, I think the key lies in points 2 to 4, which are all linked. If I was a CEO of a small enterprise right now, I’d certainly want to maintain comms about the state of the company to external audiences and stakeholders, but I’d be looking for someone who could offer real value for money. Someone who could show measured results for the money invested and could use innovative ways and means to communicate with people online – which inevitably costs less. I’ll know that when I buy a toaster, I look online, I read reviews online, maybe even a blog entry or two before buying it. I’d assume all my customers were doing the same with my product.

As this article in the Montreal Gazette suggests, the differentiator for PR has been social media. It quotes a recent survey of 200 plus Canadian small businesses by BizLaunch, a free training service for small businesses.

• 43 per cent of respondents believed PR was their most important marketing tool, followed by social media with 38 per cent and online advertising at 31 per cent


• Only 26 per cent of businesses said offline advertising, such as in newsprint or radio, was their most important tool

So why is PR better placed to take advantage of social media? Very simply, because Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs are essentially about conversation, or ‘word of mouth’, and who better to lead this than a PR person? Sure, as a recent PR Week article by Hotwire/ 33’s Drew Benvie suggests, some are concerned that marketers and designers may have more of the essential technical skills needed to create the digital experience, be that a Facebook application or a viral video. But the message has to come from somewhere, and to make sure that what you are saying in blogs, forums, on Twitter and to the online media all ties in, better have the PR person do that. Drew points out that the creative skills you can hire into an agency or outsource. I totally agree with this. I’d also suggest that designers and marketers can’t ‘hold the conversation’ and achieve the desired effect in the way a PR person can. Advertising and marketing are nearly always a one way street. In the world of ‘Have Your Say’, the customers want to talk about it, and it’s always been the job of PR to influence that conversation.

So the recession has forced PR to be more creative, to cut costs and to offer additional services. As a result, PR has been forced to grab social media with both hands. This has made it more engaging than ever before, added new skills and indeed a higher value to the industry. This had started to happen before the recession, but it was the threat of job losses and budget cuts that really drove the uptake in 2009, producing what many have termed the ‘digital revolution’ of that year. That’s not to say PR owns social media – it feeds into all disciplines, and the most talented ‘social media experts’ as they are often dubbed, are the ones that understand how campaigns can be run across all mediums. But PR delivers the message, and by its nature, it’s the best at promoting what it is doing with social media.

Primavera Blog Launches

So, hello!

This is the public blog of Primavera Recruitment Ltd, written by me, its MD, and will pretty much mirror much of what is said on the company website here, although maybe with some more personal commentary here and there, and with the added function of comments and links.

Primavera is a search and selection consultancy specialising in the public relations industry in the UK, so posts where will be about both the public relations and recruitment industries from our perspective. As PR moves deeper into the realm of social media ever day, there will a lot about that kind of thing on here too.

I hope you find something of interest...