It’s not every day that you read a first person account of someone getting fired from a Madison Avenue shop. People usually go away quietly, and you hear about it from your colleagues the next day. You may hear that they did this or that wrong, but it’s often hearsay; unconfirmed and you never hear from or about that person again.

I’ve been in advertising for most of my professional career. I find that while ad agencies outwardly boast that “human resources” make them what they are, many of them, especially the large ones treat their employees as commodities. You may know what I’m talking about if you work at an ad agency, but you rarely hear about mismanagement outside the confidence between two employees because very few ad agency folks blog, in contrast to the 1,200 employee bloggers that – for example - Microsoft has. Perhaps this may change, but I’m certainly not holding my breath.

Part of the Young & Rubicam Brands umbrella, Wunderman is a large ad agency known for their direct marketing and happens to be “the most experienced customer-focused marketing communications company in the world.” And I would later find out that no one internally cared that it said that on their homepage. I interviewed there this past April for an Account Executive position on a large global account. The picture that was painted for me was nothing but rosy.

I declined to continue the interview process with two other companies in order to accept the position at Wunderman. I started on May 4th. There were two other account executives on the team: a management supervisor whom was my direct report, and an account director whom I was also to report to. For the first couple of weeks, there wasn’t a lot for me to do except attend some status meetings and internal creative reviews and help out one of the other AEs with internal management of projects. The management supervisor, ‘Gary,’ and the account director, ‘Steve,’ were out of the office a lot in those first 2 weeks, traveling for client meetings and I was told that they would need to find time to sit down together and figure out what responsibilities I would take on.

When he returned, Gary tasked me with managing the development of some banner ads that had to be launched per our media plan. Piece of cake, especially since the creative look and feel had already been determined by offline creative. Would I be liaising with the client to ensure that they were happy with how they looked before they went live? Oh no, I just had to e-mail the banner ads to him, and Gary would follow up with him. That was nearly the extent of the client interaction that I would have.

Let me take a step back at this point and talk about the role of an account executive. As an account management position, an AE is supposed to be the day-to-day client-facing contact for specific projects. They are supposed to be aware of projects’ status and keep their clients updated it . An AE makes sure the clients’ needs are being met, briefs internal teams on client direction and requests, and acts as a buffer between the client and internal personnel, trying to ensure that the client is happy. An AE’s job is first and foremost about the client. If there is no client, then there is no job for the AE to do. As you get higher in title, generally you get farther away from the day-to-day management of individual projects and closer to managing the relationship between the agency and client. Ultimately, the account management department is responsible for keeping the client happy with the agency and increasing or at least sustaining the amount of business the client gives the agency.

The banner project took a couple of weeks to complete, with my spending an average of 1 hour per day on it, working with the creative department, technology and project management. The only other project where I was given full oversight responsibility was a landing page project: managing the development of a landing page that the banners would drive to. Just like with the banner project, I had no client interaction related to this project. I was working directly with a client-side tech team to ensure a smooth launch. There wasn’t any client management here, but more of a back-and-forth to make sure that they got what they needed, when they needed it.

I was put on 2 other, larger projects while I was there. The first one was to put together an extended version of a style guide. Steve assigned the project to me generally, but he didn’t give me any specific responsibility on it. The client contacts were Steve and the project manager, and the project manager did all the internal management. Not once was I told what my role on this project was, or what I should be doing.

The other project was for the launch of a new brand. The primary agency contact on this was Steve the account director and a strategy director, ‘Sophie.’ So again, I had very limited client contact and yet among the internal teams, I was perceived to be the go-to guy for questions on what the client was looking for. Trying to take charge as much as I could, I always reiterated the project direction coming from Steve and Sophie. I was asked to sit in on just two client meetings for this project. One was a working session with the client (they had flown in to NYC) so that they could see the creative concepts we were working on. The other was a creative presentation over the phone. Steve and Sophie were in person with the client, and I, together with the creative team, gave the presentation. Just as with the previous project I mentioned, with this one, I was never given a specific role. What was frustrating was that there wasn’t a day-to-day account person with client contact. Steve, the only client-facing account person on the project wasn’t around very often and then Gary would occasionally sit in on meetings and contribute his 2 cents. To further keep me out of the loop, I wasn’t briefed on client input. Steve often briefed the creatives directly. The highlight was when I asked the creative director how the concepts were going, completely oblivious to the fact that the client had changed the creative direction. To my memory, it went something like this…
“Hey Dan, just wanted to see how things are going.”
“You’re kidding right?”
“No, not really.”
“Well, I’m feeling pretty overwhelmed since the client changed the direction”
“They changed the direction?”

It may sound like I was just accepting the situations without raising a fuss. I could have complained about the lack of structure, but I was there for less than 3 months and I was trying to make my bosses’ lives easier, not harder. Furthermore, making sure that I have a defined role is more my bosses’ jobs than mine. They were both inaccessible, and we never had a “how are you doing?”-type conversation. I wasn’t an apathetic employee either. I pointed out that the claims the big launch was based on were faulty and offered a solution. I even knew some research companies that could furnish the data that we would have needed. This claim was part of the reason the client later halted the campaign. I pointed out that the media plan was too broad and not targeted enough. I can’t recall how the plan performed, but the end results weren’t pretty. I recommended a flash demo solution that we could pitch to the client. Gary was all about the idea, so I proactively put together a deck on why they should do it. I repeatedly threw out ideas on how we could be more effective or more efficient, and always volunteered to spearhead the effort. That’s why it came as such a surprise to me when they later said that I was not proactive.

I received very little feedback, but the feedback I did receive was positive - “that e-mail was awesome,” and “this looks great”. The feedback I received from the client-side tech team was also positive - they wanted me to handle a new round of landing page changes instead of one of the other AEs who had taken it upon herself to spearhead it.

In the three months that I was at Wunderman, there wasn’t a tremendous amount of work, and it was only decreasing as time went on. We were clearly overstaffed. In July, things started looking grim. A big launch that most of the team was working on had flopped and the client shut it down and postponed all campaigns until September. A statement of work for the brand launch that I was working on wasn’t getting signed. I knew that it was a matter of time before we got word of budget cuts (we were in the middle of going from FY06 to FY07) and jobs had to be slashed.

Late in the day on Tuesday July 25th, I got called into Steve’s office. An HR director was there. “Due to lower than expected budgets, some negative feedback we received about you, and because you’ve been here for only three months, we’re going to have to terminate you,” was the gist of what he said. The lower than expected budgets was no surprise to me but the “negative feedback” was a shock. I hadn’t received any official feedback much less anything negative. When I pressed for examples, all he returned was that he was told that I wasn’t giving people the confidence of that of “a more seasoned AE” and that “instructions had to be repeated to me.” It was obvious that he wasn’t even sure of the reasons for the termination. It was just what he was told. HR promised me that they would provide more details on the exact feedback once they were able to collect it. Here is what was sent to me:

• Not perceived to be functioning at the AE level
• Does not follow agency process after being briefed on it and continues to share things with clients without sharing with the team or getting the appropriate approvals; Isolates himself in his work, not collaborative with the team
• Unable to manage the client
• not proactive in his role
• Overall, the larger team did not have the confidence needed in this position to move forward, instead they began going elsewhere for information

Interestingly, “directions had to be repeated” isn’t on there. I have a lot of difficulty taking these claims seriously. I didn’t even have any client responsibilities, much less an ability or inability to manage them. Hmm, the only things I ever shared with a client are pdfs that were required for creative presentations. It’s obvious to me that much of this was made up, and that someone took advantage of the fact that I’m not the type of employee who sucks up to their boss asking what they can work on next to put “not proactive in his role” in there.

It’s abundantly clear that the reasons I was given were not the actual reasons for why I was fired. No constructive feedback for the duration of my employment and then boom! here are all the things you did wrong so we have to let you go. So why was I fired? I have no way of knowing for sure, but maybe my propensity for pointing out things that were broken made someone feel threatened. Or perhaps firing me was a convenient way to get someone out of trouble for having an overstaffed account. Maybe after I left, they concocted further more stories about me so they would have someone to blame for the problems that they were facing on the account.

I may have left without putting up much of a fight as I knew that arguing would have been pointless. But I refuse to perpetuate the silence that generally follows such incidents.

Wednesday, September 6th, 2006 at 5:54 pm.
Filed under Uncategorized.
Subscribe to RSS 2.0.
Comments and trackbacks disabled.