So what do we all do?

An introduction to what people actually do in marketing agencies.

Account Handlers

Account Handlers handle things. Or, to be more specific, they handle clients. But steady now! They don't handle them in that kind of way. You can find a card in your local phone box if you want that sort of thing. No, what I mean is that they handle the client-facing side of things, being the client's point of contact with the agency.

What they handle then, is the client's marketing needs or their "account". And in a place like Brahm, that can mean a whole lot of things. For example, in our advertising department it could mean handling everything to do with a campaign of national newspaper ads, in which case the Account Handler would formulate a strategy (i.e. decide who we're selling to and how we're going to sell the product), speak to our media department to decide which newspapers to use, write a brief to the creative people, then oversee the ads as they appear in the press. Easy! What an Account Handler needs then is great organisational abilities and that elusive quality known as "people skills".

Account Handlers tend to specialise, so they become an expert in their field, and at Brahm we have Account Handlers in advertising, recruitment, research, promotional marketing, PR, digital services (internet stuff) and direct marketing. Account Handlers start out as Account Executives, which means they run around doing all the donkey work, sorry, I mean facilitating things for Account Managers, who are the next step up the food chain. The biggest cheeses are Account Directors who take responsibility for a team of Account Managers and Account Executives.

"Creative" People

Everyone's creative at Brahm, because as much creativity goes into a good brief as into an award-winning ad. However, the traditionally "creative" people are found in the design and creative departments. The borderline between design and creative is a fuzzy one, but boils down to the fact that creative people tend to do more single minded concept-based work i.e. ads and direct mail pieces, whereas designers tend to concern themselves with creating a style, a tone of voice and a personality i.e. logos, brand guidelines, packaging, websites or corporate literature.

Designers spend ages ripping up magazines and poring over paper samples, whereas the creative kids do what the world at large think all advertising people do. i.e. they sit about with coloured pens chucking bits of paper at each other. Wherever possible, creatives work in a team of two (so they have someone to throw their paper at) with each team consisting of an Art Director (who is of a more visual persuasion) and a Copywriter (who deals more with words). The chaotic world of the creative department is overseen by the Creative Director. Lucky chap!

Studio/Production

Turning creative concepts into stuff that gets printed (ads, literature, newsletters, exhibition panels etc.) is the task handled by Studio and Production. Studio is filled with the hum of Macintosh computers and overheated fingers as a small army of Mac Artworkers turn raw materials like photography, fonts and layout drawings into finished mac artwork. They're aided and abetted by Production Managers who source materials from printers and manufacturers, and ensure that mac artwork is done on time. Easily said - not so easily achieved. Production get through a lot of aspirin.

Media

These characters are in a weird world of their own. They've got strange jargon for everything: supersides (that's an ad on the side of a bus), DPS pages (which means Double Page Spread, or 2 successive pages to the layman). Baffling though this jargon is to the rest of us, life in the media department boils down to answering one very simple question: how do you reach as many of the people you want to talk to as possible, within a certain budget?

Media buying then is about assessing the options available and recommending how to talk to people effectively. If you're selling plumber's pipes there's no point in buying TV space during Coronation Street! So instead you'll look at ads in plumbing magazines or maybe architect's journals. However, should you be selling a new alcopop to twenty-somethings, "Plumber's World" is probably not the way forward.

Digital

The digikids are the people who make websites. We have designers, who do the pretty stuff, developers who do the techie stuff and folk who make sure everything's spelt right and makes sense. When they're not making websites, they make e-mailers, CD-roms, online ads and extranets. They also have to keep up with what's going on in the digital world, which means many an hour spent trawling the web for 'news of technological developments' which sometimes seems to take the form of Simpsons cartoons.

IT

IT people do the same in any company; they keep the forces of chaos at bay. Thought I'd give them a special mention though, because without them the place would grind to a halt roughly once every 3 hours!

Support Staff

These are the accounts people, receptionists and other secretarial support who keep Brahm running on a daily basis.

For further information please telephone Maria Lambert on 0113 230 4000 or email m.lambert@brahm.com