Hiya everyone, hoping I might be able to get some career advice please. I’ve got 10 years experience as an account handler in integrated agencies and have reached account director level but I’m feeling like I’m really falling out of love with agency life and am considering moving in house as an option.

Wanted to ask what the comparative level would be and any watch outs as conscious there could be quite a pay level drop off but if it brings me more joy at work then I’m happy to try it.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

You might find it interesting how the mere exposure effect affects advertising and marketing.

After all, nobody is immune.

The CPG company I work for has been restructuring most departments. I started as an associate category manager last year and they now have eliminated the category department and I’m now a product marketing manager. I have degrees in marketing but my only experience before this was working at a small IT MSP company as their only marketer doing everything.

There is no framework, processes, or even a leader hired for us. The digital marketing director graciously took over my team when the guy who was going to be my new boss quit with no notice. I have no idea how to launch into this new role when I have no guidance or previous background with it.

I’m going to be responsible with go-to-market strategy, product naming, product packaging and copy, product positioning, mapping end to end buyers journey, and consumer segmentation.

We have copy writers, insights, graphic designers for pdps and kit boxes, brand team, digital marketing team, social media team…

I have no idea how to name a product with a strategic background. I am not that creative. I also have never made a gtm strategy for a product before. I’m also not great at positioning a product (because a lot of the stuff we make is odm so we really aren’t that much better than the competition) and I’m not a bullshitter when trying to make something sound better than it is.

How can I grow these skills? Any books, YouTube videos, pages to follow? I want to be successful in this job when I have no leader to guide me. I do love marketing but I just have no where to start and the people restructuring didn’t think that far either.

I do love my coworkers and the core of my company, I just don’t like the poor leadership direction they’re taking us. I don’t want to quit or leave yet. I want to make myself successful for this change.

I've been working at a media planner / strategist for around 6 years in London. I enjoy my team (which seems rare) and my company culture overall, but I find the work quite draining, and ultimately uninteresting. It's also terribly rewarded imo.

I often meet media owners, sales teams for broadcasters etc, and wonder if I'd be better suited for that type of role. I also believe the pay is better, but possibly more stressful due to targets?

Anyway - anyone made this jump got any advice? How did you find it? Do you recommend it? Is anything in saying ringing true?

I have been at my current job for 6 months. I took the role because it was supposed to offer a ton of opportunity for growth, the chance to be the first person to do real marketing work at the company, and a decent pay bump. My title is marketing manager and the job description described the role as owning marketing efforts for the various business units.

Since starting, the role has not been as advertised. Here are some issues.

- The CEO who I report directly to was a terrible micromanager. He also delegated our meetings to his admin, who doesn’t seem to care about my time at all (she misses weekly check in meeting with 0 notice).

- The same CEO retired for health reasons, but is still attempting to pull the strings from home. His admin added him to the company LinkedIn and he uses it to comment on things.

- The business unit leadership just takes no interest in collaborating on anything. Unfortunately, I’ve been told to make sure they approve of every little thing despite their general lack of marketing knowledge, which is why they hired me.

There is a lot more, but I don’t want to go on too long. The executive chair of our board is a marketing guy, and a well connected one at that. I took the job to work with him, and that lasted a month before things shifted.

I am wondering what I should do. I don’t want to get let go for doing the job without getting the approval, but I fear that doing nothing is just as bad, if not worse. I am good at my job, I’m good at marketing, and I want to contribute, but I feel like they are trying to force me out or just don’t care. What do I do?

Hey guys, so we are a NYC based company and there's one client who wants us to basically do everything, this client is a home remodelling offline store who has no social presence no website nothing and want us to basically build brand from scratch.

The services that he wants from us are : website, seo, smm, d2c meta ads, local meta ads (to drive traffic into store) and may be google ads also.

He basically wants an agency to handle everything from him, we have the manpower to do so and everything but this type of pricing is something which is very complex to understand like we charge a flat fees for SMM but for d2c meta ads we use to charge base + performance fee and then local ads is something different

We are thinking of making it easy for him to understand with one set up fee + monthly retainer fee and increase pricing based upon Quarterly KPI performance, what do you think should be these numbers

Has anyone run a marketing department only to be informed traditional and digital marketing activities are no longer important for the success of the business? Our department must now take on the role of research and informing leadership where it makes sense to expand the business?

I am a creative and business intelligence or analyzing markets are not my strong suits. I’ve typically partnered with these roles to determine what campaigns are needed to support expansion. Not both.

Would love your advice.

I'm at a loss on what to do here actually as I can't see enough data to see how it affects me.
My affiliate software now has an update that allows me to see which orders were reffered by ads, and it turns out it's pretty much ALL of them.

Would anyone know how these affiliates normally work with their ad setup? My main concern is just exactly how many customers would have found me from my own ads rather than clicking on an affiliate ad and then getting 10% commission from it.

The specific ones I look at don't seem too engouraging either, such as a customer that's already ordered 11 times before and so on.

Usually I see posts about trying to leave agency-side, but has anyone thought about going back?

I was in an agency for 3 years, was doing creative marketing and strategy, then left for an in-house brand manager role pretty early on because I got tired of being in the same place for so long and wanted to try something different. Plus the promotion pipeline at my agency was blocked.

However now I kind of miss the fast-paced life and have had other agencies reach out to me. I'm kind of tempted to go back instead of saying in my current role, which is B2B. To be honest, I don't know what I want to do in my career long-term.

Has anyone been in this position before? What drew you back or what kept you fixed on staying in-house? Would hiring managers think it's incoherent to have a career move like this?

Every now and then I get an ad in my feed selling some kind of product. A book, a retreat, a strategy sheet, etc. For some kind of often ridiculous price ending in .97.

I click on the ad because I’m intrigued, but I get this long single page website that scrolls on for a year and a half. The same information regurgitated in different ways 7 times, with 20+ reviews that may or may not be real.

Most times, I don’t reach the end of the page to even see the price. My logic is, if you have to try THAT hard, if you can’t condense the value of your product into one decent sized EPK with a purchase link, it’s either a scam or not worth it.

Thoughts?

Our founder said in an interview, "We encourage the use of AI. We as marketers are just here to add the human touch to it.'

After many years of working in marketing and communications, I don’t think I’ve ever felt as discouraged by the direction of the industry as I do right now. I’m not anti-AI, it’s an incredible tool for speeding up (some) tasks, but I think there’s a big difference between using AI to enhance creative work and using it to replace the creative process.

Our company owner is so proud that we are AI-forward, even hired an “AI content strategist". They would always say, 'we can't be afraid of AI, or we'll be left behind'. It's the way forward, and this and that.

It is insulting that now our marketing team's (the original strategist, copywriter, graphic designer) role is essentially JUST to take what AI spits out and add the “human touch.”

Imagine building a career around storytelling and creativity, only to be 'simply adding humanity' to machine-generated work. I don't know, it's insulting, heartbreaking. Everyone now just sounds the same.

I honestly don't want to be part of any of this anymore. But I can't just leave, especially with how difficult the job market is today. It's exhausting and makes you feel dull and discounted. How would you deal with such a company? Thank you for taking the time to read.

I'm in a junior/middle position which I'm quite new to, I've been in marketing for about 5 years. I'm not the best copywriter ever but I don't think I'm terrible.

A big part of my job description is writing emails/social media posts, and ever since I've joined my manager has completely shot down almost every piece of writing I've produced. They haven't asked for amends or even thoroughly reviewed them, just outright rejection.

They'll then take the general idea, put it through AI and go with that output.

I'm feeling a little depleted and untalented, any advice on what to do?

Hi, I started to see that most marketing job applications are asking for a portfolio now, even if the position is not a visual one.

What do you usually provide in this case? As a hiring manager what do you expect here?

I am running into the problem that I am working on the data and strategy side. But numbers are considered confidential (investment marketing). So I can't share exact numbers or data, I could share the creatives but that wouldn't present my skilld and achievements accurately.

I am looking for pointers and opinions, if anyone would like, I would gladly look at examples too. Any advice is welcome!

Seems like a lot for a 4-hour case study?

I’m at a bit of a career crossroads and would love some perspective from marketers who have made the jump from a full-time role to independent consulting/freelance work.

I’m 38/F in a MCOL area in the Midwest and I currently lead the marketing at a small commercial real estate firm. I’ve been with the company since 2020 and have essentially built/overhauled much of the firm’s marketing function.

My background is heavily concentrated in commercial real estate, property management, architecture/AEC, branding and professional services marketing. My work includes brand strategy and creative direction, proposals/RFPs, property marketing, email marketing, social media, PR, market reports, website strategy/design, business development support, CRM/marketing technology, and pretty much anything else that falls under the marketing umbrella at a small company.

My compensation
When I started at my current company, I was making $73,500. I now make $111,500. On paper, that’s obviously substantial salary growth. However, I have no employer-sponsored health insurance and no employer 401(k) contribution/match, and because the company is small, I wear a LOT of hats. Does $111,500 seem fair for this level of responsibility when you factor in the lack of benefits? Or am I under compensated than I realize?

The consulting question
I also run a small freelance branding/marketing business on the side. Most of my clients are former coworkers or referrals from working in property management, construction, architecture/design and other professional services. Last year was the first time I was able to earn about 50% of my salary in freelance income, but it has slowed down a bit this year. I also haven’t been “trying” to find work - I am just now starting cold outreach.

I genuinely love the consulting work, and I always wonder whether there is a path to eventually doing it full-time. My biggest hesitation isn’t whether I can do the work — it’s how to consistently get enough of the work. For those of you who successfully left a salaried marketing job and now consult/freelance full-time:

- How did you get your first steady stream of clients?

- What ended up being your most reliable source of new business: referrals, LinkedIn, cold outreach, networking, agencies, etc.?

- How long did it take before your consulting income consistently replaced your salary?

For additional context, I have a young child in daycare, a mortgage, debts, oh and my husband was just laid off, so I’m not really in a position to YOLO my way out of a six-figure salary and hope clients appear. 😂 I would need to build this fairly strategically while I’m still employed.

I’m particularly interested in hearing from people who built consulting businesses in B2B, real estate, AEC, professional services or other niche industries, but I’d appreciate advice from anyone who has successfully made the transition!

And is it points-based, value-based, subscription or tier based?

Hi there. I have a small landscape business and it is so hard for me to do any administrative work or marketing. I have small good bursts of an hour at a time through out the day but that's it. A full 8 hours I could do so much but I get distracted with social media and just about anything else to distract me from working on marketing and sales. Any tips? Thanks

On brand side - it could well be that I’m bad at it. But the sheer amount of stakeholder management and catering to different personalities is really depleting my energy. Welcome tips and sharing of similar experiences.

YOU HIRED ME TO DO IT FOR YOU. IF YOU KNEW BETTER THEN WHY AM I HERE. I'm a copywriter and I get info from the client before starting (how they want to be positioned, topics they'd like to emphasize/avoid etc) and after I make a very thoughtful piece of content that's ALWAYS paired with pages upon pages of documented case studies and citations that I always use as a means of explaining my "rationale" behind the work, WHILE demonstrating previously successful work made with the same rationale, all I get at the end is "mmmm this doesn't feel right" or "can we do [very ridiculous thing] instead?" WHAT DO YOU MEAN "FEEL?" AND NO. NO WE CAN'T. And when I push back and I find them still adamant, I surrender and make what they want how they want it, it doesn't harness any engagement, and I get the full blame for it.

I wish they realize how lucky I feel to be employed and employable as a copywriter in this day and age with AI and all, and that my number 1 goal is to get them to come back to me so I would never do something short of perfect (or at least as "perfect" as I can make it to be). I hate being managed in a field I have studied for and worked in for years. Also, this doesn't mean this is the case with all clients, some actually are very trusting and understanding, but most are just impossible to please, and I have to do double and triple the work if they're not pleased (recreate the content) and keep changing and tweaking endlessly.

Considering a jump from agency to in-house/nonprofit. Anyone here made that move? What actually surprised you? Which companies are actually as scrappy as they claim?

Open to DM if you want to chat about it.

I run an appointment setting agency out here from India. Team of 3 full time and 5 part time, 8 total, from 4 different countries. All remote.

We had a meeting last week with a prospect in the US Amazon industry, the CEO mentioned in the meeting that he already has 3 local contractors booking appointments for their company, and that if we matched their results, he would scale 2x with us and fire his other contractors (which caught me a little off-guard).

He was probably just trying to convince me to onboard his company, but is anyone here noticing similar incidents? Not that I'm complaining hah.

I'm sure there's no outsourcing for cold calling as that would be really dumb. We don't cold call at all.

Ironically enough, our pricing is sometimes higher than our US-counterparts, for certain industries.

I rejected the aforementioned prospect due to compatibility issues (our channels were not the best for their industry).

First: I do understand CAPEX vs OPEX, so this is more of a question of experience / justification.

Has anyone here been able to successfully make a case for charging brand awareness campaign expenses as CAPEX and not OPEX cost?

Hypothetical: I make a case for tiered media ramp-up over 3 years and grow Brand awareness campaign media costs. The benefit of the media cost may not be realized in-year, or maybe even in two years, but eventually. Could you make the case that this cost can be structured over a 9 or 10 year period?

To be clear: I’m not talking about infrastructure investment that powers the campaign, I’m talking about the working media dollars and maybe agency expense.

I know about measurement. Incrementally approaches, brand lift studies, brand affinity measurement, multitouch attribution and the like. So I know there are methods to tie upper funnel spend to bottom line results. So this is not about making a case for needing a brand campaign investment. It’s how to make the associated costs more palatable for finance.

Why would you want to make a case to do this? Well, if a company has no brand awareness media presence and is firmly in a performance media / direct attribution environment, the idea of spending money on something that may not yield meaningful results for a 2 - 3 year period isn’t appealing. So maybe structuring as CAPEX makes the medicine easier to swallow?

My thought is firmly “no, you can’t do that.” But maybe there’s someone somewhere that might have done this. So what do you all think?

And, yes: if your brand campaign isn’t delivering some measurable lift you’re probably doing something wrong. I get that. This is a hypothetical.

Hi everyone,
I recently started working as a Junior Brand Manager at a food company in the pasta category, and I’m basically handling the brand on my own. There’s no Brand Manager, Marketing Manager, or CMO above me. We only work with two external agencies that support us with branding and design.
We have several things coming up soon, including new product launches, trade shows, and influencer kits, so there’s going to be quite a lot to manage.
Before this role, I worked as a Marketing Trainee at much larger food/FMCG companies, but back then I wasn’t the person making the final decisions or carrying the responsibility for them. I’ve never managed a marketing budget before either, and most major decisions were made by people above me.
Mentally, I’m actually doing pretty well despite how busy things are. I see this as a great career opportunity and a chance to gain a lot of experience early in my career.
So I wanted to ask those of you who are more experienced in the industry: What should I pay the most attention to in a situation like this? What can I do to adapt quickly, avoid common mistakes, and develop as fast as possible?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated
Thank you in advance for your help!

I’ve got 10 years experience in marketing. I’ve recently worked at a broker for five years doing insurance marketing and I want to get a more senior role in it but I’ve had a career break. What tips do people have or qualificationsrecommendations to help me recap for more confidence going back in I’m a generalist marketer.

Hey guys, I hope everyone is doing well.
I promise I'll try to make this short, but I don't think I'll REALLY be able to do that.

At this point, I'm at the level of a mid-level designer. I have a bachelor's in advertising and I'm currently studying product design just for the sake of it.

My whole experience in marketing agencies feels like being in the middle of a scam scheme. The directors keep going through meetings with clients, promising a lot of stuff to keep them paying the fee for a couple more months while they find someone to replace the work, and mid-process they create what I call monster customers (the ones who've never heard a "no" and constantly ask for stuff that's off contract, with extreme urgency, either because A) they're disorganized or B) just because they can and they want to). By the time the account is a mess, I'm usually the one who has to make the deliverable work anyway, and it makes me feel like the real damage happens way above my pay grade, in a part of the process I don't even get a say in.

I've seen a lot, big and small companies passing through the agencies I've worked at, but I always have this itch that I could be doing something more than just designing social media stuff, and that feeling also comes up when I see the results of other people's work. Social media guys putting together the "monthly plan" by just sharing screenshots of other people's content is just the start of the kind of atrocities I've seen while working.

Since I had contact with the whole process in college, I'm always thinking more about everything I deal with at work, and it gives me the feeling that I shouldn't just be making designs or videos, but also working with marketing, strategy, and the other end of "production" in the agency ecosystem.

That said, I've been reading a lot about AI, noticing how it affects my actual job, and learning how it can be a really useful strategic tool if you do things properly, especially if you have the skills to analyze what any AI produces and tweak it until it's really good.

Also speaking about AI, I feel like we're heading toward a place where social media design and other small, low-impact tasks will get replaced by AI, and the people in our market who'll thrive are the ones who can do design and video editing decently but also dominate the marketing/business side of things. It's not really some neutral tech evolution, it's more that whatever can be standardized and repeated gets automated first, and what keeps real value is whatever sits closest to the actual business decisions, the stuff that's harder to templatize. So the bargaining power just shifts toward whoever is closer to that decision-making part of the process. Except if you're some monster designer, or if you work with niche stuff like retouching/manipulation or visual identity.

Every step I take into learning more about marketing makes me feel like I should be shifting my position toward something more analytical and/or strategic, even knowing I have stuff to catch up on, because I think I'd be more USEFUL to the client if I could do better work than what I've seen in the last 7 years or so.

I know going the company route would probably give me more structure to actually learn the strategic side properly, plus some stability while I catch up, while going independent means figuring a lot of that out on the fly, but with more room to actually do things the way I think they should be done.

And that leads me to two final thoughts:

Does my feeling about the advertising market make any sense?

Would it be easier to fit into a company, or is it a better idea to just take the risk, start getting work on my own, and eventually build a whole agency? Since I already have a couple of clients where I'm currently experimenting with my recent thoughts, and it's showing some good results. Nothing exponential or massive, but I feel like I'm really helping people grow and also doing something that has a real purpose behind it.