From Account Manager to Digital Business Manager: Why We Changed the Title

Job titles are a strange business. We invent them to signal where someone sits, what they are responsible for and how far up the ladder they have climbed, and then we spend years quietly arguing about whether any of it means very much at all. Marketing is as guilty of this as any industry.

An executive becomes a manager, a manager becomes a senior manager, a senior manager becomes a head of something, and somewhere above all of that sits a director, a VP, a chief-this-or-that. The words multiply happily, while the work they are meant to describe does not always keep pace.

There has been a healthy backlash against it, too. You will have come across the "head honcho", the self-styled "Captain Tech", the "chief happiness officer". Half a joke and half a serious point: people reaching for something more human than the standard hierarchy, a title that says something true about how they actually work rather than where they rank. We have a fair bit of sympathy with that instinct. At its best a title describes a job rather than decorates it, and describing the job honestly is really the only thing it is good for.

Personally I voted for Growth Jedi, but was over-ruled. The important part for me was capturing the scope of the work we support our clients on, and "Account Manager" underplays the working partnerships we have with them.

Ross Miles, wannabe Growth Jedi

That is the spirit in which we have made a small change of our own.

What has actually changed

Every Coffee Marketing client now has a named Digital Business Manager as their single point of contact, in place of the old account manager title. The people are the same, the relationship is the same, and nothing about who you deal with or how has altered. What has changed is that the title now matches the work, which has always reached a good deal further than the ad account.

Although titles are arbitrary and not really important in the modern work environment, we felt we should describe ourselves in a way which represents the work we do and the relationship we have with our clients and our relentless focus on driving success, whatever it takes.

Alistair Williams, Founder

Why we go way beyond "Account Management"

Account management is a real and valuable discipline. By the plain meaning of the words, an account manager looks after an account: the planning, the reporting, the day-to-day stewardship of the work. Done well it is the bedrock of a good client relationship, and it is still at the heart of what our people do every day.

The catch is that it describes one part of the job rather than the whole of it. The thesis the entire business runs on is that the ad click is only ever as good as everything around it. You can have the sharpest bidding strategy in your category and still lose money, because the click lands on a checkout that stalls on mobile, or the creative does not match what the shopper expected, or you are spending into a channel your customers have quietly left, or a competitor has undercut you on the very products you are pushing hardest, or the order converts and then the supply chain cannot fulfil it in time. None of those problems live inside the ad platform, and yet every one of them decides whether the advertising returns a profit.

So our people have always worked across the technical, commercial, creative and strategic factors that govern whether the advertising actually pays. In practice that means advanced reporting and insight through the Coffee Marketing Analyser, where decisions are drawn from many correlated data points rather than a single dashboard; custom dashboards built to a client's sector and stage; and standalone audits, from technical and AI visibility to landing-page and social presence, that surface the gaps before they start costing you. A Digital Business Manager engages with whatever stands between a client and profitable growth online, and then either solves it or finds the right route to solve it. That is a remit defined by your success, not by the edge of an account.

For me it was never about the account, it was always about the person running the business. "Account Manager" makes it sound like I'm minding things from the outside — but I'm already in it with you. I know your business properly, sleeves rolled up, and we work it out together. "Digital Business Manager" finally says that.

Carrie Sargent, your business's biggest fan

The system the title is named for

Breadth without a system is just doing more things and hoping. The system underneath ours is the Digital Marketing Maturity Model, a maturity model we use to assess where a business is today and what it needs next. It maps the interlocking factors of a digital business and sets clear objectives, tactics and tasks for the stage a client is actually at, then draws on the right service for each requirement of that stage. A business proving a concept needs different things from one scaling hard, and different things again from one defending its margins across several channels. Working the whole model, stage by stage, is what turns "we look at the whole picture" from a claim into a method, and it is exactly how clients pull clear of competitors who are still optimising the account on its own.

That is the job a Digital Business Manager is named for. Not the account in isolation, but the whole business behind the click, looked after by someone whose remit is helping you succeed across every part of growing online, and growing your profit while you do it.

Same root, proper name

Underneath the new title, nothing about who we are has changed. We are still a performance marketing agency, still rooted in paid media, still focused on profit over revenue. Real people. Real results. For really cool clients. The title has simply grown into the job, and the job has always been the whole picture that makes your advertising work.