into two categories. Poets. And killers. Poets see an ad as an end. Killers as a means to an end.’ If you are both killer and poet, you get rich. Art directors You cannot get a job as an art director unless you have had some training in film, layout, photography and typography. It helps to be endowed with good taste. Since print went out of fashion, many art directors have turned themselves into television producers. Television, being a visual medium, is a natural outlet for their talents. Art directors used to be the handmaidens of copywriters, but they have now gone up in the world. Indeed, some art directors have risen to become distinguished Creative Directors – notably Bob Gage at Doyle Dane Bernbach, Hal Riney at Ogilvy & Mather, and Keith Reinhard at Needham, Harper & Steers. Account executives The chief role of account executives is to extract the best possible work from the other departments of the agency. They are in daily touch with clients. If I wanted to become an account executive, I would first spend a couple of years at Procter & Gamble in brand management, followed by a year in a consumer research company, learning what makes people tick – particularly people who are less well educated than I am. Some agencies now hire more women account executives than men. In the New York office of Ogilvy & Mather, 69 per cent of the account executives are women. It used to be that account executives were better paid than the brand managers who were their opposite numbers on the client side, and were often responsible not only for the advertising, but for the total marketing plan. But those days are over. The clients now recruit at the same business schools, and pay higher salaries than agencies. As a result, the role of the account executive at many agencies has been reduced to one of co-ordination. On an airplane not long ago, I overheard the following conversation: