Hi! I'm Priyanka. In June of 1998 I graduated with a degree in communications and a vague feeling that advertising would be glamorous. In July of 1998 I started as an assistant account executive at a mid-sized agency (about 120 people, a couple of regional brands, a bank, a grocery chain and, this year, more dot-coms than I can count). In August of 1998 I learned what a CPM was, by being asked in a meeting what the CPM was and not knowing. I have not had that feeling since, because I went home and made flash cards.

This page is the guide I wish someone had e-mailed me on day one. It's for anyone starting out on the account side of an agency, or thinking about it, or just curious what the people in the nice shoes actually do all day. I'm fourteen months in, I was promoted to AE in April, and I still don't know everything. But I know more than I did, and I've got the flash cards to prove it.

Short version: I am the client's person inside the agency and the agency's person with the client. The creative people (writers and art directors) make the ads. The media people figure out where to run them and buy the space or time. The production people get them made. The account people, that's me, are the ones who make sure the client wants what we're making, that we're making what the client wants, that it's on time and on budget, and that everyone has the same understanding of what "on time" means. Which they never do.

In practice, in a week, that means I:

• Write the creative brief (see the glossary) and defend it in a meeting with a creative director who has been doing this since before I was born.
• Write the conference report after every client meeting: what was said, what was decided, who's doing what by when. If it's not in the conference report, it didn't happen. This has saved me twice already.
• Write the weekly status report, which gets its own section below because it's the whole job in one document.
• Walk layouts and scripts over to the client, present them, take notes on the feedback ("can we make the logo bigger"), and bring the feedback back to the creatives in a way that doesn't make them throw things.
• Chase estimates, chase approvals, chase signatures, chase the media plan, chase the photographer, chase the client for the thing they promised on Tuesday.
• Go to lunch. This is real work. See below.

The account department ladder, at my shop anyway: assistant account executive (AAE) → account executive (AE) → senior AE → account supervisor → management supervisor → a corner office and a lot of golf. I am on rung two.

Everyone in the building uses these words like you were born knowing them. You were not. Here they are.

Every Friday afternoon I send each client a one- or two-page status report. It's the single most important thing I produce, and nobody tells you that, because it's boring. It's a table, and it looks like this:

Look at rows three and four. See where it says Client in bold? That's the whole point. The status report is how you tell a client, politely, in writing, every week, that the reason their banners aren't done is that they haven't sent the copy. Nobody can be mad at a table. When the client calls in October asking why the banners are late, you have six status reports that say "Was due 9/17." Write the status report. Send it every Friday. Send it even when nothing changed. Especially when nothing changed.

A client lunch is a meeting where nobody admits it's a meeting. Here is what I have learned about them in fourteen months, mostly by getting them wrong.

1. You are not there to eat. Order something you can eat with one hand while nodding. Nothing with sauce, nothing with shells, nothing that requires concentration. I order the chicken. I always order the chicken.
2. Have three things to talk about that aren't work. Their kids, their golf, the game last night, the weather, the new restaurant. Read the sports page in the cab even if you don't care. Especially if you don't care.
3. Let them bring up work. They will, around the time the entrees come. When they do, that's the meeting. Have one thing you need from them and get it before dessert.
4. Don't drink if they don't. If they do, have one. One. My account supervisor says the second glass is where careers go.
5. The agency pays. Always. Have the corporate card and have it out before the check comes. Do not let the client reach for it; if they do, you've made a mistake somewhere upstream.
6. Write the conference report anyway. Yes, for a lunch. Two lines. "Discussed timing on Q4 plan; client will sign by 9/29." It counts.

The big one. The creatives have made the thing, and now you and the creative director and the account supervisor go to the client's conference room and show it to eight people, one of whom has the power to kill it and doesn't know which one he is yet. Here's my checklist, refined over eleven presentations, two of which went badly.

• The night before: Print everything twice. Put the boards in the portfolio case in the order you'll show them. Check the case. Check it again in the morning. In February I got to a presentation with the previous client's boards. I'd like to say I recovered gracefully.
• Get there early and take the room. Set up the easel where the decision maker can see it without turning. Figure out where the light switch is if there's a video. Test the VCR. Test it with the actual tape. Rewind the actual tape.
• You open, the creative director shows, you close. My part is the setup: remind them what we agreed the ad needed to do (the brief, in two sentences), so they judge the work against the brief and not against their mood. Then the CD presents the creative, because it's theirs and they're good at it. Then I come back in with next steps and timing, so we leave the room with a decision or at least a date.
• When they say "make the logo bigger": Write it down. Say "let us take a look at that." Do not argue in the room. Do not let the creative director argue in the room; that's what the little kick under the table is for. Sometimes the logo does need to be bigger. Not usually. But sometimes.
• Never say "I think." Say "we recommend." You are the agency, not a person with a feeling.
• If it goes badly: It's not over. Get the specific objections down on paper, agree on what "fixed" would look like, and set a date to come back. The worst presentation I've had ended with a client saying "this isn't us." The second version, two weeks later, ran for six months and won a local award. The creative director still doesn't like it. The client loves it. Both things are true, and I'm the one who has to hold both of them.

I have to write about this because it's all anyone in the agency talks about right now. Sometime around the beginning of this year, the phone started ringing with companies whose names end in ".com" and who have, and I cannot stress this enough, money. Venture money. Money that was raised for the specific purpose of "building the brand," which is to say, spending it on us. I was handed two of them in the spring because the senior people were full up.

Working on a dot-com account in 1999 is different from working on the bank:

• The client is 27 and the CEO. The bank's marketing director is 54 and has to ask four people. The dot-com CEO says yes in the meeting. Sometimes he says yes to things we haven't proposed yet.
• The timeline is "now." They want the campaign in three weeks because they have a "launch," and the launch date is decided by when the money runs out or the next round comes in, not by when the creative is ready.
• The brief is hard to write, because when I ask "what do you want people to do after they see the ad," the answer is "go to the web site," and when I ask "and then what," there's a pause.
• Everybody wants TV. Everybody wants a Super Bowl spot. The media department has explained the price of a Super Bowl spot to three separate clients this year, and two of them said "okay."
• The ads have to have a sock puppet, or a guy in a costume, or someone getting hit by something. There is a house style forming and it's "wacky." The creative director loves it. The account supervisor keeps asking who's going to remember the web address after the wacky part.
• They pay on time. I'm not being funny. They actually pay on time.

Is it going to last? The older people at the agency have a look on their faces when the subject comes up. My account supervisor told me to enjoy it, learn everything I can about the web, and keep the bank happy, because "the bank will still be here." I'm writing that down here so I remember she said it.

1. The job is mostly writing. Briefs, conference reports, status reports, e-mails, estimates, cover memos. I write more in a week than I did in a semester, and it all has to be clear, short and impossible to misread. Nobody told me. Take the business writing class.
2. "Advertising" is 5 percent ideas and 95 percent logistics. The idea takes an afternoon. Getting it approved, produced, trafficked and on the air in the right size takes eight weeks and a hundred phone calls, and every one of the phone calls is mine.
3. The creatives are not your enemies and they are not your friends. They are your colleagues. They will fight you on the brief and thank you for it later, or not. Either way, protect their work in the client's conference room, and protect the client's business in the creative department. Both. At the same time.
4. Learn to read a media plan and an estimate. Ask the media buyer to walk you through the flowchart. Ask the print production manager what a "bleed" is. Ask the broadcast producer what "dubs" are. People love being asked. They do not love being asked twice, so write it down.
5. Nobody notices when things go right. The ad runs, the client is happy, the creative director takes a bow. The account person's reward for a perfect job is that nobody knows it was hard. Make peace with that early or find another department.
6. Your shoes matter more than your degree. I'm only half kidding. Look like someone the client would trust with their money, because that's literally the job.
7. Keep a folder of every conference report you've ever written. Twice this year that folder was the only thing standing between me and being blamed for something I'd warned about in March.
8. Go home sometimes. The agency will let you stay until 10 p.m. every night. The agency does not love you. Your friends do. I learned this in about month nine, and I'm still working on it.

More from Madison Avenue and thereabouts: Ad Nauseam: Commercials I Love and Hate (Pete's a copywriter, so read it knowing that), Jingles I Can't Get Out of My Head (Ted knows more about radio than anyone I've met, and he's not even in an agency), Clip Art Corner (where I got the light bulb), The Working Mom's Notebook (for what comes after this, I'm told) and Life at State: Marcus's Freshman Year, which is where I was seven years ago and which reads like a postcard from another planet.