“So why did you shift from Client side to Agency? Nobody does that. It’s Agency people who jump over to Client!”
That, in twenty-one words, pretty much sums up the biggest comment I deal with on a bi-weekly basis when people find out that I have shed my Marketing skin (the snake metaphor is quite apt), and plunged all naked and wrinkly into the Advertising world.
I ask, in return, why I shouldn’t have done so.
And they, in response, always point to an answer that seems as obvious to them as an two-testicled penis: “Marketing is better. When you’re the Client, you call the shots.”
(I hope you have noticed, at this point, that when one is an Account Dictator Director such as myself, one never spells “client” and “agency” with small c’s and a’s at the start. These words are Proper Nouns, and must always be accorded the dignity of capitalized, font size 42 first letters. In bold Haettenschweiller, no less.)
I have analyzed and distilled and condensed and filtered and subjected to reverse osmosis my answer to this comment. And what I have to say is this.
“Calling the shots” when you are a Client, is an over-simplified truth. As a Client, you are genetically engineered to be capable of just two things: (1) writing a brief, and (2) disapproving (and occasionally actually approving) creative work. In between are gaps in your week that measure about six inches long on your standard wall calendar, filled with dreadfully boring activities that contain about 5% creativity, and 95% Microsoft Excel-driven inanity. Let me explain further.
When reasonably intelligent, well-bred, stunningly sexy individuals such as I are in college, we are brainwashed to believe that Marketing is the hottest profession since sheepherding went out of fashion in the late 1700’s. You’ll do advertising campaigns!, our professors squeal with pride, You’ll launch innovations, change lives! You’ll be able to sell shampoo for P2.00 a sachet!
The tragic reality is that 70% of your day as a Marketer is spent slumped at a workstation, churning out demand plans, profit & loss statements, and forecast variance analyses. You spend hours in meetings with some of the most left-brained people in the world, from factory managers, to financial analysts, to production line workers, to research technicians. You condition yourself to believe that a 15-minute dialogue on the nifty new macro installed in the new SAP upgrade passes as “small talk”. Occasionally, you do get some excitement when your drab little workspace is invaded by sleek, black-clad, turtleneck-and-Gucci-wearing individuals from the Advertising world, but those moments are few and far between.
Things are different when you live the Agency life.
In the Advertising world, you are constantly immersed in a social solution consisting of 90% purely creative people, and just 10% worth of odd contaminants with such curious names as “Production Traffic” and “Finance”. Your meetings are full of copywriters, art directors, producers, and production designers, all of whom are armed with sparkling white (or occasionally black) MacBooks and distinguishedly scruffy pairs of Chuck Taylors. You spend at least ten hours a week chugging down buckets of beer sponsored by some excitable Creative Director, while debates rage around you on whether Comic Sans MT is more evil than your local Church of Satan, or if red Sith lightsabers pack more punch than blue or green Jedi ones.
And really, every day in the Advertising life is a day of exciting output. It could be a clever new print ad, a hilarious new storyboard, or even just a pretty contact report. You get to sit and watch as creative ideas are born, nurtured, and dragged into wild puberty by a room of mildly-inebriated concept teams. You get to be a writer, a designer, a dreamer, a doer, all in a span of just thirty minutes.
You open Excel only about five times a year, and two of those rare moments are just to check if two and two still add up to four in the 21st century (my secretary tells me they still do).
I could go on and on. I’m just so happy.
I do want to establish however that I hold no angst towards my four year Marketing stint. It’s really helped me a lot. I can discourse intelligently, for example, on how a 0.3% cost reduction on a mayonnaise formulation actually helps bring vitality to 80 million Filipino lives. I have learned the difference between induction and conduction sealing. I know how to work thrilling software innovations like ACNielsen I-Sight 6.2 and Microsoft Binder. And most importantly, I can make you believe that increasing my logo by 3/10ths of a centimeter on an advertorial actually helped improve my sales in Tuguegarao public markets by 7% for two weeks last February.
I was really good at my old job. I spent two years on the High Potential list at U-Will-Never, I got to pretend I was Category Manager for six months, and I was always reminded by my advertising, activation, and media Agencies that I was one of their favorite Clients (it was my plunging necklines and plaid pants that did it).
But I really love my new career. If I could pick any Karen Carpenter song to sing about it, I would probably sing a disco remix medley of “Top Of The World” and “Sing (Sing A Song)”.
“Calling the shots” is an overrated cliché. What I do now as an Agency person is far more important, and far more fulfilling. It’s called “living my dream.”
And that, at the end of the day, is why I did what I did.
(By the way, this is a highly editorialized opinion piece, so none of you are allowed to speak up in defense of the Marketing side of life.)
