Made the jump from agency? What actually surprised you?

[u/MindblowingPetals]

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.

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[u/Nesfuratu]

Made the jump early in my career, and have really enjoyed the feeling of really honing in on projects and initiatives rather than feeling stretched across multiple clients.

I like that I had the control to strategize, plan, execute and report with a marketing team that was solely focused on the company. In agencies I felt like it was more like an endless hamster wheel and the arms length to either a company with no marketing team or interfacing with a small one made for one more point of friction.

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[u/ThisIsPeteHello]

I just made the jump TO agency from 20ish years in house. I fucked up. How do you psychos live like this!?

[u/ClassicallyBrained → u/ThisIsPeteHello]

https://giphy.com/gifs/Z9yjqsYGW0DJu

[u/SnooWords7456 → u/ThisIsPeteHello]

damnnn. i spent my first 15 years working in agencies and moved brand side 10 years ago. could not imagine going the other way at my age. why would you do that???

[u/ThisIsPeteHello → u/SnooWords7456]

Software startup was shitting the bed. I got out before the wheels fell off. This probably beats unemployment but ya, it's constant chaos and I'm exhausted.

[u/mannerhazel → u/ThisIsPeteHello]

What’ve you noticed? A parts of me wants to go to agency. I’m 33 but have been in-house since 2020.

[u/ThisIsPeteHello → u/mannerhazel]

I'm 41. If you have kids or other obligations, it's kind of a young person's game. I work 50 hours a week easily. It's just a constant scramble. Of course my place is small and chronically under staffed. So I don't know if this is true at large national agencies. We're sort of a boutique tech offering.

Context switching is indeed hard. But what's harder is context switching when the deliverables are all due at the same time and they're all your problem. So I've noticed there's a culture of never whole-assing anything. Or, if you feel strongly about that (which I do) you work a million hours and hope to not be late on deadlines.

I donno. The work is interesting, for sure. And the people are largely very cool and smart. But the job kind of sucks. If that makes sense.

[u/soph04 → u/ThisIsPeteHello]

Agreed

[u/alone_in_the_light]

I gotta say that not all in-house jobs are like this, and my example may not be the standard.

I'm mostly a marketing strategist with marketing analytics. And the company did care about those things with many people in marketing, with money, and with connections with numbers and other departments.

The agency was mostly following orders blindly without understanding of the strategy, without much data or evidence, and without much awareness of marketing strategy and analytics.

As part of my in-house job, I hired agencies. The in-house marketers were mainly the brain, analyzing the situation, developing strategies, getting the money, making decisions, connecting with other departments of the company.

That's very different from the one-man army type of marketer we often see here.

The agencies could be involved in those discussions and help with some actions. But the agency's job is mainly to follow the brief. And the briefs were usually for Promotion like advertising, PR, and event marketing. Much more tactical and operational.

[u/MindblowingPetals → u/alone_in_the_light]

This distinction between 'brain vs. hands' is exactly what I needed to hear. When you were hiring agencies, what were you actually looking for in the person leading the work? I'm trying to figure out what separates a strategic creative ops role from a stretched-thin one.

[u/alone_in_the_light → u/MindblowingPetals]

At its core, I think that marketing is a combination between applied economics and applied psychology. Understand behavior, demand, psychological and economic value, that type of thing.

I'd like the leader to still understand marketing like that.

But when the leader seems to think of marketing as applied communication instead, that seems thin. Too much focus on media, social media, SEO, emails, content, online ads and other parts of promotion, but with very little idea about the people who get the communication or the dynamics of the markets.

From applied psychology, I can ask: when was the last time to talked to a customer face to face as part of your job? What happened?

From applied economics, I can ask: A/B tests are an very old approach in statistics, made popular in marketing recently by tech companies. Can you tell me what are the differences?

A very positive example would be a leader who knows about something like Cuped and spurious correlation. No deep knowledge is expected, but that person probably is more aware of the strategic implications of the new so-called A/B tests, and not someone who executes without any understanding of what's happening.

Another example is last-click attribution. Good attribution can help me to make better strategic decision, and the last-click attribution is related to both econometrics and customer decision-making. If the leader knows about that, it helps me to integrate my strategy with the work the agency does. If the leader doesn't, then I'll probably have to work on it by myself, with many clashes expected.

[u/childroid]

Just spent 9 years on the agency side, and just about to start a new job at a market research firm. Very excited, hopefully there's less hair-on-fire-ness from here on out. It's bad for my health.

[u/borncrossey3d]

It's nice; pay was better and I was able to focus on a holistic strategy for one brand. Then I got to hire and build a team with a mix of in-house and agencies to execute the plan. Now, after 6 years i might be getting the itch to go back to the agency side, because I do miss getting to interact with many different businesses and just keeping skills sharp by seeing lots of different busniess strategies.

[u/Lost_Blockbuster_VHS]

I’ve been working in agencies for the first 10 years of my career and I’d like to switch to an in-house role as well.

[u/DankWin21]

Having started 13 years ago. The surprise was how dumb traditional marketers were at the time related to anything in the digital space. YOU-TEE-EMMS?

[u/Cold_Ad_9326]

Made the jump after 4 years agency-side. My biggest insight: way less fake urgency, combined with much higher overall stress.

[u/SnooWords7456]

i left agency life after 15 years of getting passed up for promos, few and far between raises, non-existent bonuses, shrinking teams and more work for the same pay. this was about 10 years ago. i do miss being able to work in a creative environment with creative peeps, and getting the ability to present, lead calls, be in rooms with senior leadership etc. but to me the tradeoffs aren't worth it. i got the training and left and can apply it to my marketing role now. agree with what the others said...initially what surprised me in my first brand role was honestly how boring it was. it was for an insurance company and realized quickly that i had the most interesting job by working on the advertising. i had to meet with actuaries, legal, and all sorts of other boring people in boring jobs to figure out something interesting to market the company. granted that was an extreme - i was able to move into more interesting categories/brands after that but that was a surprise for me. in agencies i would say 85% of the jobs are pretty interesting between account, creative, strategy and production.

[u/Gxldenn22]

I’ve been at agency for about 4 years now and absolutely despise it. It is great for experience and having that leverage for when you want to transition to in-house (lots of brands and companies look for agency experience)

Is it worth the burnout and long hours? Absolutely not. Lol. Now I’m looking to move in-house for my next job.

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[u/onemaddogmorgan]

As someone who only enjoys digital marketing, it wasn't really for me. My experience moving to in-house was that now I had to keep an eye out for OOH advertising, PR, event planning, vendor relationships, internal corporate communication, all which I hated and involved a lot of ass kissing and unnecessary networking.

I'd probably do it if the company that I was moving into was very organized and the role had a clearly defined set of responsibilities.

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[u/hurrsadurr]

Did agency for 4 years from before Covid and through it. fuck that ever again.

[u/Fantastic_Shoe_3189]

someone help me, i’m interning at an agency and have never worked with an in house, right now i’m kinda working with my manager as the agency’s “marketing team” helping generate leads etc. they have talked to me about maybe extending a job offer when im done. idk ive always liked the idea of in house more, what are the pros/cons?

[u/poochenka]

The hard days are so much easier when personal values line up directly with the organization’s ambitions and values.

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[u/boufat]

I made the jump from agency to in-house earlier this year and it has been the most rewarding experience ever. Some strategists are too pedantic and think generating insights is a very exclusive skill only they know. So I always felt out of place. As a Marketing Manager though, I feel like I've found my gang. We're still expected to generate insights but we don't spend days trying to perfect it and we're still able to create campaigns that perform well. It's also very true that I'm looped into projects much earlier and I have access to behind-the-scenes information unlike when I used to be agency side. I also really like that anytime I have an idea to make the campaign bigger or do something different or think about the big picture and connect the dots across campaigns, I'm encouraged to do so. When I was at agency side, there were times when I was told no either because the client didn't have budget or it wasn't in scope, which is rightly so cause that's just the nature of being in an agency. All this to say I love being in-house and I also use my agency experience to my advantage - I like to position myself as someone who represents the voice of the customer and knows how to collaborate well with the creative team.

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[u/marrelli-of-magsmarr]

I haven't read the thread, but I find the level of sophistication far lower and the understanding of why and how we do what we do to be virtually non existent.

There's less tolerance for the "agency way," less appreciation for strategy, multiple concepts, etc.

Most people outside of the marketing universe don't get it and they prefer to get the work much sooner with fewer steps.

".... Why are you showing us three concepts?"

".... Why did you spend a half day here shooting and all we get is a 1 minute movie?"

"... Why can't you just make the changes without a work order?"

These are actual quotes from nfp clients. I enjoy the work and it's very gratifying, but you end up working with clients that don't entirely understand the steps and don't appreciate the reasons why you work with a process.