opportunity will come when you rise to a great occasion. Some years ago, Lever Brothers asked their seven agencies to submit policy papers on the television medium, which was then quite new. The other agencies put in adequate papers of five or six pages, but a young man on my staff took the trouble to assemble every conceivable statistic and, after working day and night for three weeks, came up with an analysis which covered one hundred and seventy-seven pages. The following year he was elected to our board of directors. Some young men and women are attracted by the travel and entertainment which attach to the work of an account executive. They soon find that lunching in expensive restaurants is no fun if you have to explain a declining share-of-market while eating the soufflé. Riding the circuit of test markets can be a nightmare if one of your children is in hospital. Account executives can be divided into custodians and contributors. You can probably get by if you never function as more than a channel of communication between your client and your service departments, like a waiter who shuttles between the chefs in the kitchen and the customers in the dining room. No doubt you will perform this function with aplomb, but I hope you will contribute more than that. Like inventing big ideas for selling the product. However hard you work, and however knowledgeable you become, you will be unable to represent your agency at the client’s policy levels until you are at least 30 years old. One of my partners owes the rapidity of his ascent to the fact that he had the good fortune to have his hair turn white at twenty-seven. You will never become a successful account executive unless you learn to make good presentations. Most of your clients will be corporations, and you must be able to sell campaigns to their committees. Your presentations must be well written, and well delivered. Do not make the common mistake of regarding your clients as dopes. Make friends with them. Buy shares in their companies. But try not to become entangled in their politics. Emulate Talleyrand, who served France through seven regimes. Always tell your client what you would do if you were in his shoes, but don’t grudge him the prerogative of deciding what advertising to run. It is his product, his money, and ultimately his responsibility.