Hey guys,
I’m starting a production role in a large ad agency soon.
My dream was to land a jr art director position, but didn’t work out yet.
I’m wondering if I will be forever brandmarked as a production guy and if there are any chances to change to a art direction role within the agency.
Maybe some of you guys with big agency experience can answer this to me.
Thank you
Interested in the gap between ads that look professionally made and ads that actually feel credible.
So let’s say hypothetically you still have your computer after a layoff and it’s been over a year and no one asked for it. Theoretically, is there a way to get around certain securities? Purely speculative, but it’s alleged that the security in question is one that doesn’t allow external hard drives.
If anyone has any tips or advice, leave in the comments!
At what point do we say “enough is enough?” All of these mergers, acquisitions, and adaption of AI are the catalysts to what will be the downfall of our industry. These big corporations need us until they don’t. What are we doing about it ?
Assuming it’s team dependent but curious from those who work / worked there
I just started at another holding company from a different one and I want to quit sooo badly. The onboarding process was non existence and I feel immense pressure every single day. I don’t think there has been a day where I don’t feel highly anxious. I’m debating texting my old manager and asking to return which is crazy because I was severely underpaid and overworked but I felt confident there. Here, I feel unsupportive and was thrown into the fire from the start. The client is cutthroat and the team is disorganized. I can get into more detail but I’m afraid someone from my team will see this. I really feel awful here.
My friend from my old company also just got hired here shortly I did and she’s also experiencing the same thing. Highly anxious and even had a breakdown.
I honestly also hate working in media! Everything is urgent and nonsense. My team is very analytical and I’m a creative person so there’s that. Just a huge misalignment.
I would quit today but I need income and insurance, unfortunately….
Idk what to do. Any advice would be helpful right now. I’m in my mid 20s and feel so drained
I think some platforms seem okay at first.. Then I use them every day. Small problems start to bother me.
For me it's about consistency. I don't care if its perfect at first.
What's the one thing that makes you quit a platform?
Is it when it takes forever to load?
When it keeps buffering when lots of people are using it?
Maybe the sound is not, in sync?
It just freezes randomly?
Is it when it doesn't work on your device?
Something else entirely?
What's the first thing that makes you stop using a platform for good?
Honestly not looking for agencies that are still stuck with traditional marketing practices. I'm in the process of launching a tool and I need an extremely creative bit Al first marketing agency.
Pls nothing with agencies charging $20k I'm sick and tired of those pre built pricing plans.
Just landed an internship at an agency! Very excited and grateful. It’s a hold co agency but a great name, my CDs seem great, and it’s hybrid so I’m pretty stoked to get to work.
I’m striving to convert this into a full time gig, but wanted to ask other senior creatives and CDs on here for any advice, tips, wisdom and even some hacks on doing really well and being noticed.
Figured there are others on the same boat or hoping to be, and thought it might be helpful for others to see too :)
I’m an indie author trying to learn Facebook advertising properly before I burn money blindly, and I’d appreciate advice from people who actually understand ad testing and audience targeting better than I do.
I write in the LitRPG / progression fantasy / military fantasy space. My current series is an alternate-history apocalypse story set in 1953 where a dormant “System” reactivates, monsters appear, and a war veteran becomes something called Warden Prime. It’s doing reasonably well organically for a small indie series:
So I don’t think the issue is “nobody wants this product.” I think my issue is marketing education and execution.
Right now I’m trying to understand:
I’ve been reading about the David Gaughran method for author Facebook ads:
That approach makes sense to me conceptually, but I’d like to hear from people outside the indie-author bubble too.
A few specific questions:
I’m not looking for magic shortcuts or “make millions with ads” advice. I’m mostly trying to develop a repeatable process and stop approaching advertising like guesswork.
Any advice, brutal honesty, recommended resources, or “don’t do this, I learned the hard way” stories would genuinely help.
I’ve been thinking more about leaving pharma for good and pivoting to consumer brands or in house!
I am not a scientific person at all but I’ve been working on pharma clients for 3 years now and I’m currently a SAE. I wanted to stay for professional experience and growth but I find myself wanting to go to consumer industry specifically beauty or retail (agency or in house) because that’s where my real interest lies. I feel like I can also better understand the brands more if they’re more in my interest.
I always feel so dumb when I can’t understand the scientific facts about the brands and as a result, I can’t give any strategic insights. Outside of work I love consuming beauty content, from print (magazines and books) and short/long form videos.
My dream one day is to work for any large beauty house but I feel like it’s so hard to pivot from pharma! Has anyone experienced this and was able to pivot?
Hello everyone,
I wanted to express something. Do me and my friend have decided to start a clothing brand together ( ik it’s too late and there’s a lot of competition now).
So the thing is he is working with the foot and quality parts of the clothes while i have to work on marketing stuff like running ads and stuff but I’m nervous and am stressing over every little detail i don’t know how i can market my product properly how will i decide the photography and how will i bring in models that will do the job… if anybody any advice or something to share with me please do
Thank you
I’ve always found this bit oddly clunky. If you want to show a client how a campaign idea might live as an article, product story or editorial placement, the usual flow seems to be:
Screenshot a publisher site
Rebuild bits in Canva or Photoshop
Try to match the fonts
Drop in the headline and image
Export it
Then redo half of it when the copy changes
For social mock-ups, there are loads of tools. But for article-style mock-ups, it still feels like most teams are hacking it together manually.
Curious how others approach this. Do you build these properly in design software, use templates, edit screenshots, or avoid them altogether until the idea is more approved?
What do advertisers on Google, or Social media experience when they drive traffic to their website. The reason i ask is websites on mobile screens look quite awful. And my guess is that engagement is poor. Is that what your analytics data tells you. If so what is the degradation in the engagement - duration - or number of page views - as a percent basis. Thanks for your feedback
I’ve been analyzing campaign performance data at my agency lately, and I’m hitting a wall when explaining traditional media attribution to clients. Everyone wants digital-style instant tracking, but physical media doesn't work that way.
I wanted to start a thread on how modern agencies are actually measuring the ROI of non-digital channels without relying on 'fuzzy' vanity metrics.
Here is what we are currently testing, but I’d love to know your frameworks:
For Outdoor/OOH: We’re tracking location-specific mobile foot-traffic data lifting during the campaign period and using custom vanity URLs/QR codes. But tracking 'top-of-mind' recall scientifically is still tough.
For Print/Newspaper: We use unique promo codes or dedicated landing pages, but the conversion trail often goes cold if the user searches the brand name directly on Google days later (skewing organic search data).
My questions for the community:
How do you isolate the 'organic lift' in search traffic that happens purely because of a physical billboard or print ad?
What baseline formulas do you use to justify traditional ad spend to a client who is obsessed with CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)?
Are there any reliable third-party attribution tools you recommend for blending offline and online data?
Hoping to turn this thread into a solid resource guide for anyone struggling with offline ad attribution right now.
Anyone successfully escape holdco advertising? What was your career pivot? Are you fulfilled? Is your boss toxic af?
Even though my salary is below industry standard, I’m nervous a complete career pivot will start me out a lot lower where I can’t afford rent living alone… in this economy!?!
Once AI advances and agentic systems are fully in place, will hold cos need as many employees?
Will more work be moved in house? I see a lot of posts recommending people not to get into advertising. Why is that?
Will people still have good agency careers in the next 5-10 years?
I want to know if running ads on TikTok 'hurts the algorithm' for pushing subsequent videos like everyone keeps on saying?
For context, I've been posting TikToks about 2x a week for a month now on a completely new account. I pretty much went straight into it, with a mix of talking to the viewers, sitting down, standing up, more editing, less editing, I pretty much done it all.
The best organic video was one I was sitting down that was 24s long, other than that I roughly averaged 500-800 views which I guess was pretty good for a new account. On the 2nd video I posted, it was about a minute long and I promoted it, it got 4.4k views which is my highest.
The one after that got 1.6k views and the one after that one was a carousel that hit just below 1k views.
I posted one yesterday at 7pm (my target audience lives in the same country) and after 12 hours, it's got 264 views which is well below par. It's a similar style to the one that done well organically but done horrendous.
The editing was better and I felt it was way more engaging.
Arsenal did win the league yesterday (COYG) but does that really affect my video getting pushed THAT much? I was wondering if paying for that ad so early on hurt my account?
Would love some advice.
We work with a lot of agencies, and something we’ve consistently observed over the last few years is that some smaller agencies are winning contracts against much bigger players simply because they:
Meanwhile a lot of bigger structures still operate like every campaign needs:
Modern advertising became insanely operational.
Clients need constant refreshes, multiple formats, localization, weekly iterations and faster turnaround than ever before.
And honestly, a smaller team that executes fast and reliably will often outperform a “prestigious” agency moving at half the speed.
If I owned a smaller agency today, I’d focus way less on looking big and way more on becoming extremely fast and dependable.
this may seem like a stupid question but bear with me…
There’s very obvious uses of AI in this industry that i know we’re all doing: gen AI imagery for decks, strat research/data/competitive/trends blah blah blah, maybe some email polishing, maybe AI meeting recaps.
But I’m asking a layer deeper - has anyone played with vibe coding tools, agentic AI, or any of these more advanced tools and actually found a use for in an agency context? or even if there’s more clever ways to use LLMs at work that i haven’t figured out yet…
i had Claude clean and organize the insane amount of files on my desktop the other day (neat?)
but shit man, what else is there?
lastly a disclaimer - please don’t get triggered about this being a pro AI post, it’s not. like everyone, we as an agency are trying to not be left behind and frankly we are all busting our ass as a small indie to do the jobs of several people. the purpose of this post is genuine curiosity and a small hope that there’s people on reddit in this business who know more about use cases for this than me!
thank you