Aquarius Advertising
FINDING THE BALANCE
The Aquarius Advertising Agency is a middle-sized firm that offered two basic professional services to its clients: 1) customized plans for the content of an advertising campaign, e.g., slogans, layouts, and 2) complete plans for media such as radio, TV, newspapers, billboards, magazines, etc. Additional services include aid in marketing and distribution of products, and marketing research to test advertising effectiveness.
Its activities are organized in a traditional manner. The formal organization is show in Figure 1. Each of the functions includes similar activities, and each client account is coordinated by an account executive who acts as a liaison between the client and the various specialists on the professional staff of the Operations and Marketing divisions. The number of direct communications and contacts among clients, Aquarius specialists, and Aquarius account executives is indicated in Figure 2. The sociometric data were gathered by a consultant who conducted a study of the patterns of formal and informal communication. Each intersecting cell of Aquarius personnel and the clients contains an index of the direct contacts between them.
Although an account executive is designated to be the liaison between the client and specialists within the agency, communications frequently occur directly between clients and specialists, and so bypass the account executive. These direct contacts involve a wide range of interactions such as meetings, telephone calls, emails etc. A large number of direct communications occur between agency specialists and their counterparts in the client organization. For example, an art specialists working as one member of a team on a particular client account are often contacted directly by the client's in-house art specialist, and agency research personnel have direct communication with research people of the client firm. Also, some of the unstructured...
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