Teaching Account Management

As adjunct instructor of "Creative Account Management" at the College of Media, Communication and Information at the University of Colorado at Boulder, I taught dozens of kids to understand account management can be more than client service — done properly, they could be critical strategic and creative assets championing great ideas.

Students regularly described this course as their favorite class at CU. The goal was to prepare graduating seniors for the realities of working in advertising. Going far deeper than theory and concepts, the syllabus was designed to challenge students to analyze, understand and apply their knowledge.

The backbone of the course were weekly discussions to “reverse-engineer” real advertising campaigns and imagine what the creative brief might have directed. Students wrote their own briefs and we compared them to the actual agency brief during class, revealing far more thoughtfulness, intentional decision-making, and strategy than many noticed at first.