In marketing, the term account refers to an advertising account. An advertising account, in turn, refers to the formal contractual relationship between an advertising agency and its client.
Advertising accounts are handled by advertising account executive. An account executive acts as a liaison between the ad agency and the client. The account executive’s duties include communicating with the client to determine goals and needs, as well as refine the client’s desired advertising feel and style. Account executives also keep clients up-to-date with the latest developments in the advertising campaign.
An advertising account may be handled by an advertising account executive on the client side, but behind the scenes there are a lot of other people, even entire departments, involved in the creative process and strategic planning processes. Examples of behind-the-scene processes include copywriting, graphical design, media buying, market research, search engine optimization, ad statistics tracking and analysis, brand recall tests, etc.
Advertising agencies usually handle multiple ad accounts with major clients. On the other hand, a company could also opt to use different agencies for different products and even multiple agencies to work on promoting just one product.
