Account directors are under mounting pressure to return to their traditional role of being the clients’ primary strategic thinker and business partner – a role that began to change during the boom of the 1980s and all but disappeared during the downsizing of the early ’90s.

The pressure is coming from clients who are increasingly turning to consultants to fill this critical role.

Agencies are, for the most part, relying on senior client services people to reverse that trend.

John Boniface, senior vice-president, group account director at Padulo Integrated of Toronto, says he has been working for more than a year to turn the agency from a supplier that happens to execute communications programs into a strategic business partner that has primary responsibility for communications.

As a result, he says, Padulo has evolved from an executor of its clients’ commands to an agency that often leads the strategic direction on its clients’ businesses.

‘An account person has historically been sort of the hub in a larger wheel – a conduit to a variety of disciplines within the agency.

‘What I think clients are expecting of senior account management is disciplined strategic thinking that is far above how it manifests itself from a communications standpoint – a business partner, a consultant on how the business should be run.’

John Hillbrich, vice-president, director of client services at Communique in Toronto, spent several years in senior roles at Leo Burnett in Chicago, Ill., Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Toronto before taking on his current position in May.

During his career, he had the opportunity to observe how account people work around the world and to watch the emergence of a new discipline, account planning, traditionally a function of account directors.

He says account planning should be done by account directors and that the new position emerged because account directors got lazy. He says during the booming ’80s, account directors began to take shortcuts by asking themselves what their clients wanted, instead of helping to determine what they needed.

‘In many ways, client service people became bag carriers’ says Hillbrich.

Clive Veroni, director of account service for TBWA Chiat/Day, says his job is more interesting these days because it covers a much wider spectrum of business issues, not just marketing.

For example, Veroni was called upon by Crayola in the u.s. to advise the company on how to manage its toy business. Veroni has advised Reckitt & Colman, another client the agency works with in Canada and the u.s., on how to train its marketing people around the world and helped develop its global marketing training manuals.

Some agencies claim not to have account directors, just account planners and project managers, but Veroni contends they are doing the same job as account executives no matter what they’re called.

‘You can arrange the chairs any way you want, people are still doing the same dance.’

Peter Tutlys, manager of advertising and promotion for Royal Bank, has been on both the agency and client sides of the business.

He says while he has been pleased with the account planners with whom he has worked, he would still prefer the account director to handle planning because there is no continuity – the planner is there and then gone. What Tutlys would like to get from an account director are more tactical ideas.

His pet peeve is the lack of ‘good integrated account people.

‘When I say integrated, I mean people who are integrated with the principles that have always been here, advertising, direct marketing, promotion, event marketing, public relations.

‘I’d like to find good integrated people that way. One very well-rounded person to come in and not bring in five or six people. Just one person to talk to every day.’