Stupid Account Team Watch: How Not to Inspire Confidence

By Ken Magill

My wife, an ad-agency media VP whose team buys a lot of online advertising, recently received the following decidedly non-confidence-inspiring message from her surprise new Google AdWords account team:

“Good Morning [my wife who doesn’t want to be named] and Julia,

“Congratulations! You and [big client] have been selected for dedicated support from your new Google account team. We are excited to introduce ourselves and to start a new quarter working with you in our mission to bring your marketing goals to fruition through Google’s online products.

“Your team is comprised of two Account Managers – [name redacted] -, an Account Strategist – [name redacted] -, and an Account Optimizer – [name redacted]. A combined total of over 12 years of experience - all for you!”

A combined total of 12 years experience? This is a selling point?

Just a wild guess here, but it’s likely not all of them have the average three years experience indicated in that claim. At least a couple have more like one or two.

“Wow!” my wife said. “We’ve been selected to be served by this fine team in diapers! I have earrings older than these people.”

Not only that, Julia hasn’t been with my wife’s team for more than a year and my wife isn’t responsible for buying search. A guy by the name of Paul is.

What is more, Paul already has a perfectly fine relationship with Google. Or at least he thought he did. He has a rep there he is on the phone with regularly.

A simple phone call could have avoided this whole embarrassment—that is, if they’re capable of being embarrassed. But given that this account team of four has a combined 12 years of experience, they probably looked for my wife’s Facebook page and when they couldn’t find it, resorted to dinosaurs’ communications medium of choice: email.

Do they even know their cell phones can be used for talking?

Anybody who has been in business-to-business marketing for any length of time knows corporate email addresses and titles change quickly—especially in a rough economy and more often than average at ad agencies—so even one-to-one messages, or four-to-two in this case, to year-old corporate email addresses are bound to be off target.

Oh yeah. Four people: 12 years combined experience. And they think it’s a selling point, rather than a question they should hope they don’t get asked.

Of course they’d email year-old corporate addresses.

Email’s been their parents’ communication channel of choice for as long as they can remember.

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