A Graduate Account Executive’s Typical Working Day - Week 4

When working in advertising; although hours of work are typically ‘9 to 5’. Generally the workload of a campaign dictates that people regularly work late. As a Graduate trainee I don't usually get home till 8pm, so the day can be long. As an Account Executive, a typical working day could consist of about 2/3+ meetings a day lasting anything between 15 minutes to 3 hours, chasing and liaising with different departments to traffic work through creative services and monitoring project progress.

I've learnt that creative types work differently to business types, and sometimes work may require a host of changes to elements such as: copy, messaging or imagery - known as amends. So it is important to ensure those changes are done correctly. Day-to-day business tasks involve a lot of financial monitoring to ensure work does not exceed the clients advertising budget and the agency achieves a profit. This involves maintaining, updating and managing cost estimates, financial forecasts, timesheets and financial reconciliations etc.

Communication is key

The job also relies very heavily on communication skills; you are constantly using verbal presentation skills to convey ideas to clients and colleagues over the phone and face-to-face in meetings etc. Written skills are also very important too, because you need to be able to compose emails to clients to clarify objectives or provide updates on project progress.

Proof reading skills are vitally important, so far I have been required to proof read advertising out-put including internal presentations, reports and advertising copy for spelling mistakes, punctuation, grammar and readability. For, work authored by copy writers and others far more senior to me. Therefore, essential to good proof-reading, if you have never done it before is: ‘attention to detail’ because your eyes could be the final pair to view an advertisement before it goes out the door.

Finally, at this stage if I was going to describe what the job of a Marketing Manager is or involves – I would say that it draws on various disciplines such as Project Management, Researching, Strategic Development, Administration, Presenting and Pubic Relations…. So it’s exceptionally difficult to pigeon hole what marketers do to one specific thing. Teamwork is also very important too, I have never worked within a team as dedicated and passionate about what they do before, everyone contributes equally to the teams output.