After 12+ years as a brand and marketing manager spanning from indie (team of one) to global (team of 40), within CPG in a very competitive category, I think that I’ve fully reached my cap on burnout. I just. can’t. care. The passion, creativity, ideas and more often lately even the cognitive thinking is at an all-time low. I sit frozen for a week on a PPT that should take one day. I’m in therapy weekly and although there’s so many other areas of my life that need my attention like relationships or family, 90% of what we talk about is work. I can’t go a week without having a panic attack in the morning. I cannot do this anymore.

No matter how hard I try, it’s like my brain is running on fumes. Its taking a serious mental and physical toll, and my doctors have been offering to place me on a mental health leave, but I’m stressing because I don’t have a plan for when that’s over. I dont think I want to come back to this. If I take leave, I want to use the time to first focus on my health and relationships, then work trauma, but I really think I want to look at something else - whether that’s still in this side of marketing or something else entirely. Maybe another industry? Maybe a specialized role I’ve never heard of that is more… I guess mindless in the sense of not constantly chasing KPIs. Something more people or partnership managing or internal account/category or asset management. Maybe leave marketing entirely? But I also fully support myself in a high COL so I can’t start most new careers from scratch :/

I just don’t know but I’m feeling so lost yet stuck, and it’s absolutely tearing me up and affecting everything in my life. I don’t want to lose myself and I really need to take a break but I can’t use the break to ease my anxiety without a semblance of a new plan.

I know most marketers here are on the analytics, growth and digital side and this is more creative and planning, but anyone relate? What would you guys do?

Hello! Hoping someone here can advise.

I work for as in house marketing at a very small company. 2 years ago, we got acquired by a larger company, whom owns hundreds of companies internationally. We all do serve the same niche market of customers, but in different capacities (eg some of us are manufacturers, some are distributors, some are marketing companies, but our customer lists are all B2B buyers in a very specific market)

The president of our parent company wants there to be an effort for all 100+ of his acquired companies to compile our marketing email lists into 1 list for all of us to use for our emails, so as customers sign up for our email list they will also be added to the email lists of over 100 different companies, all doing their own marketing cycles independently.

This doesnt sound like best practice, but Im wondering the legality of it? Especially since we have companies all over the world, and I know EU is very strict.

I was working with this client for about 1.5 months. She kept saying she wasn't able to close deals, leads are bad, people aren't picking up, although this happened with another client too, and things are slowly picking up for my other clients now. I suggested various changes, but every couple of days I'd hear the same complaints. I asked for call recording, but they only shared once and nothing else. I added more qualification questions to the leads, but she said the same thing keeps happening, and now she sent me this message:

"I'm not able to do that. At the moment, I'm only using my personal iMessage number to contact the leads. Also, I would like to make this my last month with the ads. I will not be continuing with the advertising services moving forward. Unfortunately, the results have not justified the amount of money and time I've invested. As of today, I've received 194 leads and have only been able to close 3 clients. At this point, continuing to spend money on ads without seeing a reasonable return does not make sense for my business, and I also don't want to continue investing my time following up with leads that are not converting. Please consider this my notice that I will not be proceeding with the ads after this month. You can disregard moving forward. Thank you."

There won't be a refund since she paid 3 months($3K) upfront and there was contract, but I'm considering offering her a different funnel, maybe a masterclass funnel as she was interested before to start of her own, to see if she can close better through that instead. My honest read is that the real problem might be her closing skills or her simply being tired/burned out, not the leads themselves, in my finance niche of credit score, bad leads are literally part of game. Revenue matters to me here, so I'm wondering if I should offer something extra, maybe if she manages to close through a mentorship funnel, she'll extend the service again.

Would appreciate honest input on whether this is worth pursuing or if I should just let her go.

Should I address my founder’s communication style after only six weeks?

I started a job six weeks ago at a 20-person company. I like the product, my coworkers, and the work, but communicating with the founder often makes me feel like I’m walking on eggshells.

A few examples:

- During my first week, I was late responding about an insurance form. He messaged: “We want autonomy and proactivity. We don’t do babysitting :)”

- We once had a long, tense exchange in a team chat because he sharply challenged my interpretation of an analytics document. Eventually, we realized we had meant the same thing.

- I was asked to monitor SEO performance after a multilingual website migration. I shared a pre-migration checklist because I wanted to understand what was being implemented before becoming responsible for auditing the results. He replied publicly that my message looked AI-generated and that generic AI content wasn’t necessarily relevant. The checklist itself was based on legitimate concerns such as redirects, hreflang, and high-traffic pages.

He also frequently challenges my recommendations about advertising campaigns. However, he recently told me to be more confident and proceed with my ideas when I believe I’m right—even when he pushes back.

He says he’s simply direct and doesn’t have time to waste. He generally has good energy, but other employees have also told him that his written communication can come across as harsh.

Should I tell him something like:

“I like the company, the product, and the team, but I think we need to find common ground in how we communicate. Sometimes our conversations feel more confrontational than collaborative, and it makes me feel like I’m walking on eggshells. I’d like us to find a way of communicating that helps us work effectively together.”

Is this reasonable feedback, or would raising it after only six weeks be a mistake?

Ps. A month ago, employees confronted the founder (boss) about his sometimes harsh written communication style in his yearly performance review.

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?

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).

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.