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Any job requirement in data analytics?
Not working this weekend... Fuck yeah
Taking BEC tomorrow... any suggestions/ advice?
A little early Christmas present to myself:
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Modern problems require modern solutions.
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Not necessarily. I’ve been on accounts with too many cooks in the kitchen and seemingly nothing gets done because there’s not a clear chain of command.
That’s a different problem
More creatives, more producers. Why do accounts have teams and production can get away without it? I'm doing the job of an entire broadcast department and am the sole producer on 3 accounts. 2 of which keep me resourced at 100-120% on their own. How is anyone able to do their best work and ensure quality executions in this environment? It's bonkers.
And when I can't get my creatives to put eyes on edits because they're stretched so thin across multiple projects and deadlines within the crazy right schedules were strong armed into because everything up the pipeline gets delayed by the same challenges.
The business model is broken. And I'm honestly not sure how to fix it other than finding independent shops that understand they need to invest in their people and product to earn and retain clients. Profit margins need to adjust to current market conditions. The days of the gravy train are long over. Budgets have been stagnant for nearly a decade while costs are going through the roof.
It's a very challenging time. We're due for a paradigm shift
My exact thoughts. It's so absurd how agencies neglect the main thing they are supposed to produce for their clients. It's like a restaurant with no chefs, or an airline with no pilots. They keep overpromising, hyperfocused on sales, without looking into how to actually deliver good creative work. It's sad how normalized it is.
True. Agencies in their infinite wisdom prefer to stock up on talkers rather than doers. A brief travels through 8 account/strat/planners hands over the course of 3 weeks then lands on a creative team’s table, where they are told “we need to see something by tomorrow”.
As long as leaders' metric for success is profit rather than creating jobs, this industry will be shit.
This. But it's not profit over creating jobs. It's the profit over good work that's the problem. The jobs are required as part of the good work equation, and they are intrinsically linked.
Yes to the right people part. On some accounts, we have too many Sr. Director/VP who have never done the actual work before (former consultants and/or no media industry experience) and can’t do anything but build PowerPoint decks. Some teams are very unbalanced. Sadly with the recent layoffs a lot of good people and industry veterans were let go.
Same experience here. My last account I had too many managers and didn’t know who I reported to. It was a constant battle of egos and client pandering while no meaningful work got done.
You already answered your own question without realizing it. For the creative advertising industry to fix itself we have to improve our margins. Then everything else you’re saying falls into place.
I didn’t ask a question
It’s because agencies aren’t run by creatives, they’re run by talking heads. They can give a great speech but can’t do the actual work - they don’t fully understand. Margins might be thin but IMO that means too many people at the top making the money OR they didn’t quote the job properly to get the business in the first place.
There are at least three reasons for understaffing overall, and the bias towards extra people in account management. First, agency margins are very thin. Second, nobody is brave enough to ask the clients for proper compensation. Third, the account team has financial control, so they staff their teams first. Of course, there are ten other persistent problems in the agency model, but listing all of that would be TLDR.
Or client holds all the leverage and is taking forever to approve a new SOW that would provide extra staffing but they don’t want to give the agency more money.
I strongly disagree. It’s the level that is very very low. Look at the work from the 90s. I’m considered good at my job, but I’m not sure I could consistently produce that quality work.
It’s not the low headcount, it’s the low quality of those head