r/advertising

Hey everyone,

I’m posting this because I’ve hit my absolute breaking point. I’ve been in the agency world for almost 5 years now, and I genuinely want out.

I spent my first 4 years at an independent agency. Unfortunately, after my salary stagnated for two years with zero room to grow, I had to make the tough call to look elsewhere. I ended up getting hired at PHD Media, which is under the Omnicom umbrella.

It’s been 9 months, and let me tell you—I want out ASAP. Honestly, I had more mental peace and a better work-life balance when I worked retail full-time.

Working here has made a few brutal realities painfully clear:
- Mental health is a joke: It simply doesn’t matter to leadership.
- PTO is an illusion: Your time off won't get approved freely; management literally dictates when you're "allowed" to use your own vacation days.
- Sick days don't exist: You're forced to "suck it up" because taking a sick day puts you so catastrophically behind that you’re staring down a 16-hour shift just to catch up when you get back.
- Work-life balance is dead: Signing off at 5 PM is a myth. The norm is working your 9-to-5, logging off for a minute, and jumping back on until late. I regularly get emails from team members at 2 AM.
- Terrible pay & high turnover: Salaries are garbage compared to competitors and don't keep up with inflation. People literally need side hustles just to survive—except you can't even maintain a second job because of the 24/7 expectations here. Burnout and turnover are through the roof.
- Micromanagement & mandatory office theater: The work could easily be done from home, especially on days when your mental health is in the gutter. Instead, they force you to commute just to deal with office distractions. Attendance is policed aggressively—called out in team meetings, grilled in 1-on-1s, and tied directly to raises, promotions, and whether you'll survive the next round of layoffs.

The Bottom Line About The Agency World:
The agency world is profoundly toxic. The only things that matter to the higher-ups are launching campaigns on time and keeping clients happy. They will throw you under the bus or fire you in a heartbeat if a client complains.

The Million-Dollar Question:
The only thing holding me back is where I can actually transfer my knowledge and experience outside the agency world—whether in marketing or pivoting to something non-marketing—especially in this brutal job market where landing anything feels next to impossible.

For anyone who successfully escaped the agency grind: where did you go, and how did you make the jump? Right now, it feels like the only option is to keep applying into the void and hope for the best. Would love to hear your thoughts or advice.

I’ve been seeing longtime IPG employees clashing with longtime OMC employees, mostly over process change in every department—account, strat, PM, creative, shared services, etc. My experience so far has been “This is what we’ve been doing at OMC and you’re doing it too (whether you like it or not).” (Again, a reminder that this was a buyout and not a merger.)

The IPG model of network integration and processes made sense to me. This new version of OMC seems to be every agency for themselves. Are any leftover IPG employees feeling this? I’m also wondering if original OMC employees are seeing a culture clash too.

Anyone have insight on Eversana Intouch -AI Agency branch? Interviewing with them and want the inside scoop! Glassdoor is similar to my current place which isn’t horrible as horrible as the rating (omc) IMO, I enjoy my team and brand.

Jk. I'm not gonna promote my small press / publishing imprint.

Hi all

I'm a London-based freelance copywriter and editor who has predominantly worked in-house with brands in their marketing department. Over my career I've generally sat in content-writing roles - web, CRM, social copy, campaign taglines. Along with a lot of branded longform content for publications.

I have no agency experience but would like to move more into the world of advertising and/or branding. Just wondering if anyone has any tips about how best to go about this, or courses I could take. I have a big portfolio of creative work just not exactly the right work.

Al agents are starting to browse websites, compare products, and even shop for us.

But if I ask an agent to check 20 websites and just give me the best three options, I never actually visit those sites or see any of their ads.

So what happens to online advertising if more of our browsing starts working like this?

Do websites start advertising to Al agents instead of people? Do brands pay to get recommended by agents?

Kinda weird to think about who ads are even for if nobody is actually looking at the page.

I am taking the bar in July and while preparing for it and finishing law school I am preparing my small hometown family firm for my arrival. I started a Facebook and I post infographics and other stuff to it, I've ran a few ads in the area to some small degree of success but I don't really know what else I should be doing. Obviously I have to comply with the RPC for attorney advertising and I plan on becoming active in the community and bar association when I move back there in April. I feel like I could be doing more though, I don't know if I should be making videos or something as well? Any suggestions? I just want to open a conversation about it not expecting anything.

I built my own video generation/editing workflow, and I’m looking for some real-world projects to test it on.

Send me your source material and tell me what you want — I’ll make the video for free.

The more detailed you can be about your concept, scene composition, camera angles, pacing, references, or specific shots you want, the better.

And feel free to ask for edits until it fits what you had in mind.

I’m mainly doing this to test how well my workflow handles actual creative requests, so detailed or challenging ideas are very welcome.

Drop your idea below or DM me!

I (unpaid intern at the time, now looking for work) had an idea that ended up being the highest engagement post of the year for the client. I tried to get the assets months after it went live, and heard and got nothing in return. This is also from an agency who gave me no farewell note and never actually formally terminated my internship. They just ghosted after my internship contract ended.

Am I morally entitled to the assets for the idea I worked on? I’d like it to go in my portfolio. I understand I may not have a legal case here but morally to not have access to my own work/ability to put it in my book seems absurd. Especially when the fuckers paid me not a red cent.

My (relatively uncool) workplace (aka in-house agency) is having a virtual halloween party this year. I'm pretty senior so I can't bail on it. The bar is fairly low given the work situation. I'm thinking of being a "bad brief" but if anyone has better ideas for a funny, SFW, screen-friendly costume, I'd love to hear 'em.

I am a recent Strategic Communications grad. At my school, there was a huge ad agency push but I was never really sure if I wanted to go the agency route or in house marketing. Is it difficult to transition into agency later in my career? I have multiple marketing and communications internships and have worked with agencies before, but never for an agency.

I like the idea of learning a ton at agencies, so I'm leaning towards that now but I'm not having much luck due to my lack of agency experience. I'm still looking at both options. My main question is about how easy it is to get into an agency later on. Do I really need to start now? Or is that something I can transition to after a few years in house?

Hey everyone! I’m working on my university thesis about podcast advertising and I’m currently trying to come up with some ideas for an experiment.

I’m specifically looking at host-read ads, meaning ads where the podcast host personally reads/talks about the product or brand as part of the episode, rather than a separate pre-recorded commercial.

I need to compare different versions of the same host-read ad and change one specific characteristic that listeners can immediately notice.

For example:

music vs. no music

two clearly different types of background music

male vs. female voice

faster vs. slower speaking

sound effects vs. no sound effects

I’m struggling to think of other characteristics that are immediately noticeable to the listener but can also be changed in a clear and objective way.

So, if you listen to podcasts, what differences in a host-read ad would immediately make you think “this sounds different”?

I’m especially looking for ideas that could work as a simple A vs. B comparison.

Any suggestions would be really appreciated!

not sure if this is the correct subreddit but

I’m trying to break into junior strategy roles (brand strategy, cultural strategy, creative strategy), but I’m finding it really hard to get traction and I’d love some honest advice from people who’ve been through this. I’m very aware that these types of roles for entry level or junior are rare or pretty much don’t exist, so I need advice on what other options I should be applying for or getting into. What’s a realistic entry point for someone with my background?

My background:

• Studied graphic design
• Built a full portfolio with conceptual brand worlds, cultural research, and strategy-led projects
• I'm not so much interested in graphic design anymore but hence why I'm trying to get into strategy or something similar to that

My portfolio includes:

• Conceptual brand worlds
• Cultural insight projects
• Narrative systems
• Strategy-led design
• Research + storytelling

Hey Ad world!

I hope you're reading this in good spirits, our industry considered.

I'm a 31 year old 🇿🇦 Mid-Snr Creative Strategist with a bit of a polymath's experience, my last two years have leaned more into product design and strategy as opposed to the traditional advertising.

I got laid off due to forces outside my control last month and it feels like I'm at an impasse. Not really sure how to get things going again. The circlejerking is something that has me disillusioned and being on the outside looking in, I've fallen out of love with the game - something I think comes across in my applications which is probably why I'm not getting any responses.

This isn't a pity post, nor do I think its a "please help me find work", I guess I just needed a place to vent out these feelings and maybe gain some perspective.

Hi there, so basically I just got hired for an advertising agency. It was a life changing for me since I was promised to work for a big account (I work as an Account).

Once I got in, I was known that most of the projects we do are also involved with another agency. Mostly we do ATL, the others do BTL/Activation. So the first meeting was held between two agencies, now I will call my agency is Agency A, the other is Agency B.

The meeting was okay. There was a point they mentioned that since that account is big (It's a very famous drink brand) and they insisted us on setting up a new team to only serve them as well as they promised us that in a few months from that period there will be a pitching opportunity. BUT THINGS DID NOT GO AS PLANNED.

Suddenly they said that all of the pitching opportunity has been closed, and we will not have any more chance to do a client proposal in the first pitching phase. We were devastated, my manager is devastated since it will be a bummer to explain to the higher ups about this situation. I'm dissapointed now when the only information we know is only from that B agency (since they r on the approved/certified vendor list)

So after have some internal discussion with my manager, we decided that what we will do is proactively approach the agency B to ask for that client pitching opportunities. It doesn't matter if it's a big scale project, a small medium would be sufficient because we will have much more reliable outcome to justify expanding our team.

But how should I approach this with the agency B in order to not soundlike we are begging for that? The two agencies have been closely collaborated with each other and we scored many succesful achievements, but now it's them underpromised us, and we have zero contact details from the client we can only hear it from agency B.

For context I'm in South East Asia, since this group from what I see it's mostly western culture. Thank you for reading and I appreciate your advices all.

An established brand can put up a logo and a few words, and people fill in the gaps. A brand entering the market might use the same approach and leave people unsure what it actually sells.

When planning billboard creative for a lesser-known brand, how do you balance an interesting idea with making the offer immediately clear?