Strong Suiting Shapes Agencies’ Fortunes. Have We Stopped Treating It As a Craft?

At their best, suits are entrepreneurs and protectors, shape-shifters and room-readers. They wield influence, connect the dots, and determine their agencies’ fortunes, according to top execs ranging from Special and Bear Meets Eagle on Fire’s MDs to chief creative Matty Burton.

But Camey O’Keefe, a former agency suit who left to found Gambol Creative and Suit School, is concerned the industry has collectively devalued the craft of suiting, and often fails to view it as a craft at all. That’s led to a hollowing out of the function -- accelerating, or at least failing to mitigate, client dissatisfaction and churn.

Because account management is largely invisible work -- not contained in a deck or storyboard -- it can be seen as the “ugly cousin to the rock stars of creative and strategy” and be hard to charge for, Camey tells LBB.

“It gets harder and harder for agencies to actually justify on some level the fee. And then, as a result, it gets stripped back, it becomes leaner, and that really powerful impact is diminished,” she says.

“And so it's almost like it's hollowing out. You don't realise just how damaging it is until you descend to a point where the client goes, 'It's just so hard to get things done … This is too hard, we're gonna go somewhere else.’”

She references, and agrees with, David Droga’s assertion that clients come for the creative, pay for strategy, and stay for account management. But over the past 15 years, suiting has become more administrative and project management-based, and viewed less as a highly-valuable craft. But it requires extreme skill: cultivating trusted relationships, creating the conditions for great work to happen, and acting as a “triple threat”, Camey says: commercially savvy, deeply strategic, and fundamentally “creative souls”.

What CCOs Want From Suits: “Thick Neck, Large Hands”

Matty Burton, DDB’s chief creative officer across Australia and New Zealand, notes agencies’ ultimate purpose is to deliver world-class work that drives results. That means “whatever business management was before, their job now is creativity,” the CCO says. “We need them to help make our creative product better.”

​Today the Brave’s creative partner Jade Manning explains that, like creatives, the best account managers know the key isn’t the art of selling, but the art of caring. “Anyone can book a meeting, summarise feedback, curate WIP meetings and check-ins,” he says.

“The difference between good and great is the care. The care to ask more, emphasise more, anticipate more, and ultimately care that a creative project is going to fundamentally transform their business. And if you get that right, it’s when you usually sell it anyway.”

He and partner Vince Osmond appreciate client partners who are in the trenches with them, want to make the work better, and know when to agree with a client and when to challenge them.

“Our clients and their brands are only as good as the work we put out into the world,” Vince says. “A happy client doesn't mean anything if their brand isn’t being seen or growing, regardless of the meetings or decks.”

The best suits Matty has ever worked with are entrepreneurs who hunt for opportunities, and act as “the instigator, collaborator, cheerleader, seller, producer and owner of great client relationships.”

While “we build machines and use data and can pinpoint locations, weather, [and] buying cycles,” sometimes “we forget that it’s not actually a science. It’s practice,” he observes. In medicine, for instance, so much of doctors’ impact comes from their bedside manner.

“We are dealing with an unpredictable group of humans who are very good at blocking you out and also not doing what they are told,” Matty says. “And then you have the clients. Also human."

They “need someone’s hand to hold Or throat to choke,” he adds. “The best suits I’ve ever worked with have thick necks and large, comfortable hands. And you would trust them with your life because they lead with integrity.”

Shape-Shifting, Dot-Connecting, Room-Reading

​Lauren Portelli, Special’s regional managing director leading arguably one of the strongest agency-client partnerships in Uber, emphasises the modern account management role is about “creative, cultural, and commercial sensitivity”. It requires “shape-shifting, reading the room, connecting dots, zooming out to find perspectives that others can’t,” she says, and to “push ideas, see the potential, hype the work, cut the budget 20 times to figure it out.”

When the function -- and agency -- is humming, “clients don’t just want the work, they want the way we work,” Lauren adds.

Myriad factors can “contribute to the death of original and interesting thinking,” acknowledges , Bear Meets Eagle on Fire managing director Toby Hussey. An account lead’s job is to ensure nobody settles for that. That requires protecting the vision, keeping energy high, building confidence, steering the strategy, thinking a few moves ahead, leading with empathy, and being willing to throw it all out the window if the situation calls for it.

Does ‘Suit’ Need Rebranding or Reclaiming?

Lauren says the word 'suit' feels “ancient” -- “‘suits’ are a bunch of redundant ad dinosaurs from 1988” -- and prefers the term ‘client partnership’, while Toby says it ”makes me think of a schmoozy salesperson”, and suggests a superficiality that belies the depth of the role. Today the Brave creatives Vince and Jade agree it sounds “awkward” and “wrong”.

“I think it does the role a disservice, defining it too narrowly, and contributing to a broad confusion about what's expected from people in the role,” Bear’s MD Toby says. “Time for a rebrand.”

Camey is keener on reclaiming versus rebranding. After all, she called her training program, set up in 2024, Suit School, and teaches "suit is not a dirty word". She established the program because she felt suits had lost a collective sense of self. “That was almost my starting point.” In her view, the underlying issue is one of perception.

“That is what made the term suit feel derogatory. This idea that it was a dismissive term to say, all you do is rock up and banter. It feels a perhaps superficial, low-value add. And I think, at its worst, it can be that.

“But if you think about our industry in the era of moving online and more project-based, the ability to cultivate meaningful human connection is probably the most essential skill set that we need. When you lose a retainer, you can't actually rest on your laurels.”

An industry categorised by agency and client consolidation, squeezed budgets, tighter timelines, and fewer big retainers has shifted the emphasis from process to alignment, Special’s Lauren agrees. “A decade ago, you could coast on process. A neat retainer, a predictable rhythm, a relationship that ticked along. That world’s gone.”

And the big retainers that do exist only emphasise the necessity of key relationships. “Think about large pieces of business that follow individuals,” Camey says. “We are a people business and that's not something to shy away from.”

Lift Suiting Standards and “Everybody Lifts”

To succeed, client partners should progress from delivering on the opportunity in front of them to stretching the opportunity to creating new opportunities, Camey believes. She hopes Suit School plays a role in upskilling, educating, and empowering young suits in the first few years of their careers.

When she is engaged by agencies, Camey often notices the fundamentals have fallen by the wayside. “The WIPs are a hot mess, people aren’t properly following up or communicating.”

To keep and win business -- which crucially includes organic growth from existing clients -- agencies must urgently assess whether their account management departments are shaped and performing the way they should be. “You can't afford not to have strong suits.”

Investing in account management has a knock on effect too, Camey says. “Suits are the glue, and so if you lift the baseline there, everybody lifts, because they've got more time and space to actually play to their strengths. When a suit is firing, the entire agency gets to fire.”