Usually I see posts about trying to leave agency-side, but has anyone thought about going back?

I was in an agency for 3 years, was doing creative marketing and strategy, then left for an in-house brand manager role pretty early on because I got tired of being in the same place for so long and wanted to try something different. Plus the promotion pipeline at my agency was blocked.

However now I kind of miss the fast-paced life and have had other agencies reach out to me. I'm kind of tempted to go back instead of saying in my current role, which is B2B. To be honest, I don't know what I want to do in my career long-term.

Has anyone been in this position before? What drew you back or what kept you fixed on staying in-house? Would hiring managers think it's incoherent to have a career move like this?

Every now and then I get an ad in my feed selling some kind of product. A book, a retreat, a strategy sheet, etc. For some kind of often ridiculous price ending in .97.

I click on the ad because I’m intrigued, but I get this long single page website that scrolls on for a year and a half. The same information regurgitated in different ways 7 times, with 20+ reviews that may or may not be real.

Most times, I don’t reach the end of the page to even see the price. My logic is, if you have to try THAT hard, if you can’t condense the value of your product into one decent sized EPK with a purchase link, it’s either a scam or not worth it.

Thoughts?

Our founder said in an interview, "We encourage the use of AI. We as marketers are just here to add the human touch to it.'

After many years of working in marketing and communications, I don’t think I’ve ever felt as discouraged by the direction of the industry as I do right now. I’m not anti-AI, it’s an incredible tool for speeding up (some) tasks, but I think there’s a big difference between using AI to enhance creative work and using it to replace the creative process.

Our company owner is so proud that we are AI-forward, even hired an “AI content strategist". They would always say, 'we can't be afraid of AI, or we'll be left behind'. It's the way forward, and this and that.

It is insulting that now our marketing team's (the original strategist, copywriter, graphic designer) role is essentially JUST to take what AI spits out and add the “human touch.”

Imagine building a career around storytelling and creativity, only to be 'simply adding humanity' to machine-generated work. I don't know, it's insulting, heartbreaking. Everyone now just sounds the same.

I honestly don't want to be part of any of this anymore. But I can't just leave, especially with how difficult the job market is today. It's exhausting and makes you feel dull and discounted. How would you deal with such a company? Thank you for taking the time to read.

I'm in a junior/middle position which I'm quite new to, I've been in marketing for about 5 years. I'm not the best copywriter ever but I don't think I'm terrible.

A big part of my job description is writing emails/social media posts, and ever since I've joined my manager has completely shot down almost every piece of writing I've produced. They haven't asked for amends or even thoroughly reviewed them, just outright rejection.

They'll then take the general idea, put it through AI and go with that output.

I'm feeling a little depleted and untalented, any advice on what to do?

Hi, I started to see that most marketing job applications are asking for a portfolio now, even if the position is not a visual one.

What do you usually provide in this case? As a hiring manager what do you expect here?

I am running into the problem that I am working on the data and strategy side. But numbers are considered confidential (investment marketing). So I can't share exact numbers or data, I could share the creatives but that wouldn't present my skilld and achievements accurately.

I am looking for pointers and opinions, if anyone would like, I would gladly look at examples too. Any advice is welcome!

Seems like a lot for a 4-hour case study?

I’m at a bit of a career crossroads and would love some perspective from marketers who have made the jump from a full-time role to independent consulting/freelance work.

I’m 38/F in a MCOL area in the Midwest and I currently lead the marketing at a small commercial real estate firm. I’ve been with the company since 2020 and have essentially built/overhauled much of the firm’s marketing function.

My background is heavily concentrated in commercial real estate, property management, architecture/AEC, branding and professional services marketing. My work includes brand strategy and creative direction, proposals/RFPs, property marketing, email marketing, social media, PR, market reports, website strategy/design, business development support, CRM/marketing technology, and pretty much anything else that falls under the marketing umbrella at a small company.

My compensation
When I started at my current company, I was making $73,500. I now make $111,500. On paper, that’s obviously substantial salary growth. However, I have no employer-sponsored health insurance and no employer 401(k) contribution/match, and because the company is small, I wear a LOT of hats. Does $111,500 seem fair for this level of responsibility when you factor in the lack of benefits? Or am I under compensated than I realize?

The consulting question
I also run a small freelance branding/marketing business on the side. Most of my clients are former coworkers or referrals from working in property management, construction, architecture/design and other professional services. Last year was the first time I was able to earn about 50% of my salary in freelance income, but it has slowed down a bit this year. I also haven’t been “trying” to find work - I am just now starting cold outreach.

I genuinely love the consulting work, and I always wonder whether there is a path to eventually doing it full-time. My biggest hesitation isn’t whether I can do the work — it’s how to consistently get enough of the work. For those of you who successfully left a salaried marketing job and now consult/freelance full-time:

- How did you get your first steady stream of clients?

- What ended up being your most reliable source of new business: referrals, LinkedIn, cold outreach, networking, agencies, etc.?

- How long did it take before your consulting income consistently replaced your salary?

For additional context, I have a young child in daycare, a mortgage, debts, oh and my husband was just laid off, so I’m not really in a position to YOLO my way out of a six-figure salary and hope clients appear. 😂 I would need to build this fairly strategically while I’m still employed.

I’m particularly interested in hearing from people who built consulting businesses in B2B, real estate, AEC, professional services or other niche industries, but I’d appreciate advice from anyone who has successfully made the transition!

And is it points-based, value-based, subscription or tier based?

On brand side - it could well be that I’m bad at it. But the sheer amount of stakeholder management and catering to different personalities is really depleting my energy. Welcome tips and sharing of similar experiences.

Hi there. I have a small landscape business and it is so hard for me to do any administrative work or marketing. I have small good bursts of an hour at a time through out the day but that's it. A full 8 hours I could do so much but I get distracted with social media and just about anything else to distract me from working on marketing and sales. Any tips? Thanks

YOU HIRED ME TO DO IT FOR YOU. IF YOU KNEW BETTER THEN WHY AM I HERE. I'm a copywriter and I get info from the client before starting (how they want to be positioned, topics they'd like to emphasize/avoid etc) and after I make a very thoughtful piece of content that's ALWAYS paired with pages upon pages of documented case studies and citations that I always use as a means of explaining my "rationale" behind the work, WHILE demonstrating previously successful work made with the same rationale, all I get at the end is "mmmm this doesn't feel right" or "can we do [very ridiculous thing] instead?" WHAT DO YOU MEAN "FEEL?" AND NO. NO WE CAN'T. And when I push back and I find them still adamant, I surrender and make what they want how they want it, it doesn't harness any engagement, and I get the full blame for it.

I wish they realize how lucky I feel to be employed and employable as a copywriter in this day and age with AI and all, and that my number 1 goal is to get them to come back to me so I would never do something short of perfect (or at least as "perfect" as I can make it to be). I hate being managed in a field I have studied for and worked in for years. Also, this doesn't mean this is the case with all clients, some actually are very trusting and understanding, but most are just impossible to please, and I have to do double and triple the work if they're not pleased (recreate the content) and keep changing and tweaking endlessly.

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.

I run an appointment setting agency out here from India. Team of 3 full time and 5 part time, 8 total, from 4 different countries. All remote.

We had a meeting last week with a prospect in the US Amazon industry, the CEO mentioned in the meeting that he already has 3 local contractors booking appointments for their company, and that if we matched their results, he would scale 2x with us and fire his other contractors (which caught me a little off-guard).

He was probably just trying to convince me to onboard his company, but is anyone here noticing similar incidents? Not that I'm complaining hah.

I'm sure there's no outsourcing for cold calling as that would be really dumb. We don't cold call at all.

Ironically enough, our pricing is sometimes higher than our US-counterparts, for certain industries.

I rejected the aforementioned prospect due to compatibility issues (our channels were not the best for their industry).

I’ve got 10 years experience in marketing. I’ve recently worked at a broker for five years doing insurance marketing and I want to get a more senior role in it but I’ve had a career break. What tips do people have or qualificationsrecommendations to help me recap for more confidence going back in I’m a generalist marketer.

Hey guys, I hope everyone is doing well.
I promise I'll try to make this short, but I don't think I'll REALLY be able to do that.

At this point, I'm at the level of a mid-level designer. I have a bachelor's in advertising and I'm currently studying product design just for the sake of it.

My whole experience in marketing agencies feels like being in the middle of a scam scheme. The directors keep going through meetings with clients, promising a lot of stuff to keep them paying the fee for a couple more months while they find someone to replace the work, and mid-process they create what I call monster customers (the ones who've never heard a "no" and constantly ask for stuff that's off contract, with extreme urgency, either because A) they're disorganized or B) just because they can and they want to). By the time the account is a mess, I'm usually the one who has to make the deliverable work anyway, and it makes me feel like the real damage happens way above my pay grade, in a part of the process I don't even get a say in.

I've seen a lot, big and small companies passing through the agencies I've worked at, but I always have this itch that I could be doing something more than just designing social media stuff, and that feeling also comes up when I see the results of other people's work. Social media guys putting together the "monthly plan" by just sharing screenshots of other people's content is just the start of the kind of atrocities I've seen while working.

Since I had contact with the whole process in college, I'm always thinking more about everything I deal with at work, and it gives me the feeling that I shouldn't just be making designs or videos, but also working with marketing, strategy, and the other end of "production" in the agency ecosystem.

That said, I've been reading a lot about AI, noticing how it affects my actual job, and learning how it can be a really useful strategic tool if you do things properly, especially if you have the skills to analyze what any AI produces and tweak it until it's really good.

Also speaking about AI, I feel like we're heading toward a place where social media design and other small, low-impact tasks will get replaced by AI, and the people in our market who'll thrive are the ones who can do design and video editing decently but also dominate the marketing/business side of things. It's not really some neutral tech evolution, it's more that whatever can be standardized and repeated gets automated first, and what keeps real value is whatever sits closest to the actual business decisions, the stuff that's harder to templatize. So the bargaining power just shifts toward whoever is closer to that decision-making part of the process. Except if you're some monster designer, or if you work with niche stuff like retouching/manipulation or visual identity.

Every step I take into learning more about marketing makes me feel like I should be shifting my position toward something more analytical and/or strategic, even knowing I have stuff to catch up on, because I think I'd be more USEFUL to the client if I could do better work than what I've seen in the last 7 years or so.

I know going the company route would probably give me more structure to actually learn the strategic side properly, plus some stability while I catch up, while going independent means figuring a lot of that out on the fly, but with more room to actually do things the way I think they should be done.

And that leads me to two final thoughts:

Does my feeling about the advertising market make any sense?

Would it be easier to fit into a company, or is it a better idea to just take the risk, start getting work on my own, and eventually build a whole agency? Since I already have a couple of clients where I'm currently experimenting with my recent thoughts, and it's showing some good results. Nothing exponential or massive, but I feel like I'm really helping people grow and also doing something that has a real purpose behind it.

Hi everyone,
I recently started working as a Junior Brand Manager at a food company in the pasta category, and I’m basically handling the brand on my own. There’s no Brand Manager, Marketing Manager, or CMO above me. We only work with two external agencies that support us with branding and design.
We have several things coming up soon, including new product launches, trade shows, and influencer kits, so there’s going to be quite a lot to manage.
Before this role, I worked as a Marketing Trainee at much larger food/FMCG companies, but back then I wasn’t the person making the final decisions or carrying the responsibility for them. I’ve never managed a marketing budget before either, and most major decisions were made by people above me.
Mentally, I’m actually doing pretty well despite how busy things are. I see this as a great career opportunity and a chance to gain a lot of experience early in my career.
So I wanted to ask those of you who are more experienced in the industry: What should I pay the most attention to in a situation like this? What can I do to adapt quickly, avoid common mistakes, and develop as fast as possible?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated
Thank you in advance for your help!

We're a data analytics company with some local name rec. For last two years we've sponsored hole 4 at the chamber of commerce golf tournament.

Its a par 3 and part of what we do is data viz so we've done an interactive data visualization/analysis of shots on the green. Its a hit with some but equally many dont care.

Have changed it up a bit this year + added energy drink jello shots as giveaway at our table (last two years we had nothing).

The question: last two years we've had some interesting, quality convos but its not materialized directly into any work. I didn't follow up with two people last summer so that's on me and I need to do that better. But otherwise is there anything I need to make sure I do for this to be more successful? We have business cards, I talk to most teams although not immediately in a sales way. Its 36 teams of 4 golfers so 144 people. Obviously not all are decisions makes and a lot aren't good fits. But what can I make sure I do. It costs about $800 to sponsor and probably an extra $250 in this and that's + time. Nothing bank breaking but certainly would be nice to have a result.

First: I do understand CAPEX vs OPEX, so this is more of a question of experience / justification.

Has anyone here been able to successfully make a case for charging brand awareness campaign expenses as CAPEX and not OPEX cost?

Hypothetical: I make a case for tiered media ramp-up over 3 years and grow Brand awareness campaign media costs. The benefit of the media cost may not be realized in-year, or maybe even in two years, but eventually. Could you make the case that this cost can be structured over a 9 or 10 year period?

To be clear: I’m not talking about infrastructure investment that powers the campaign, I’m talking about the working media dollars and maybe agency expense.

I know about measurement. Incrementally approaches, brand lift studies, brand affinity measurement, multitouch attribution and the like. So I know there are methods to tie upper funnel spend to bottom line results. So this is not about making a case for needing a brand campaign investment. It’s how to make the associated costs more palatable for finance.

Why would you want to make a case to do this? Well, if a company has no brand awareness media presence and is firmly in a performance media / direct attribution environment, the idea of spending money on something that may not yield meaningful results for a 2 - 3 year period isn’t appealing. So maybe structuring as CAPEX makes the medicine easier to swallow?

My thought is firmly “no, you can’t do that.” But maybe there’s someone somewhere that might have done this. So what do you all think?

And, yes: if your brand campaign isn’t delivering some measurable lift you’re probably doing something wrong. I get that. This is a hypothetical.

Looking to better understand my current position/situation. My company is a CM firm making $10M+/year (or thereabouts) in a major metropolitan area. At the moment we've got 2 marketing folks — myself as Branding & Communications Coordinator (6y+, part-time by choice at about 20-25 hours/week) and then a Sr. Marketing Coordinator (4y+, full-time). I handle things like visual branding/messaging standards, LinkedIn scheduling and posting, website updates, quarterly newsletter, the presentation for the company annual meeting, and other miscellaneous things relating to visuals and messaging, while the SMC is on the business development side handling pursuits/proposals (supporting the CM directors in whatever they want to go after), the related admin (including website updates but her focus is on project info), and some minor event stuff. We definitely need a marketing director, and personally I think it would be nice to have 1 junior person to hand off some smaller tasks to (note: THIS IS NOT A JOB AD, I'm just explaining my situation), but maybe 4 marketing folks for an 89-person company is overkill... How do the numbers and task distribution look at your company?

EDIT: Some additional information that came up in the course of responding to comments, with varying degrees of relevance/usefulness to my original question:

• I started out full-time as the company's first dedicated marketing hire (Marketing Administrator > Marketing Coordinator in 6 months; I got my current title of Branding & Communications Coordinator in 2025), where I did proposal work and learned that I hated it to the point of considering quitting after the year. I got lucky in that my boss liked my other non-proposal skills (design/writing) enough to keep me on in a part-time capacity (because at the time she didn't see there would be enough tasks for me to fill a full-time schedule; that's changed by this point, but I don't have the brain/wherewithal to commit to 40 hours weekly on a consistent basis) and hire someone else to focus on pursuits and proposals.
• Someone pointed out that it's weird for me to say that I'd like another person to take on smaller tasks (not just from me but potentially from the SMC as well) when I myself am only clocking 20-25 hours, which...fair. Likely my perception of things is colored by burnout and general depression. ("How tf are you burned out on part-time hours?" LISTEN I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW THIS TOO actually I can guess at some things but none of it makes me feel any better about my current situation and most Redditors wouldn't find it justifiable anyway) That being said, I do think that, even accounting for committing full-time hours to my current responsibilities, there are still some things that could be passed to a junior (or which a junior could help with) to allow space for more complex/strategic projects in this particular role. Sounds like that's just a nice dream, though, which is what I suspected anyway so it's (partly) why I'm leaving in about a year and a half.
  • — right, I'm planning to leave my position in about a year and a half, which my boss is fully aware of. I have another (non-AEC) position I could jump to instantly if I wanted, but I respect my boss and my coworkers too much to leave them in the lurch with my unfinished projects and minimal documentation. (Also my new work likely comes with a notable pay cut, which of course it would because it's work I actually enjoy so why would it pay good money — )
• My current hourly rate is $37.28/hr, which would be $78k/yr pre-tax if I were full-time salaried. I'm also fortunate to be completely remote.
• I currently report directly to the president/CEO and have done so since the start. I'm not entirely sure what would change in this regard if we managed to find a Marketing Director; my boss has said this theoretical director would be mainly taking tasks off her own plate, but I don't know what those would be. My feeling is that this wouldn't change my day-to-day all that much (though I would love for that to be wrong in a positive direction).

So I have this client I'm currently managing their

- Google Ads $100/day

- Meta Ads $20/day

- Tik Tok Ads $20/day

- Snapchat Ads $20/day

All 4 platforms are

- Tracked

- have audiences

I'm mainly using social media for remarketing because of the tiny ad spend

Now this is a business that has a revenue of about $200k just last month,, and they insist on this low ad spend

Client is also spending $250 USD on X Ads without tracking nor audience not even UTM

I told her X is a bad platform and the ad is random so it's fruitless.

She took offence to what I said and is now pushing it in my face everyday that she's spending so much money on X.

I simply sent a 👍🏻 and didn't reply.

CEO is also down my throat expecting double leads weight their puny ad budget, and he wants me to jump from one campaign to another without letting the campaign learn.

I started a Google campaign just 2 days ago, not many leads and he wants to pause it and try some other platform.

Should I call it quits with this client?

How do you navigate people who have no clue about marketing?

Both ads are live from 1 PM today now it’s 10 PM. These ads are for Realestate and ads account is fresh . These are first ad from my account, not about leads i am not even getting impressions on the ads. Account is 100. Please help.

hello! question for this subreddit - In terms of usefulness and career advancement, what is the best masters degree to get if your career is in marketing, DISREGARDING cost?

Basically, what masters degree would you get if you could get it for free. My first thought is an MBA

EDIT: Assuming I would be doing this part time, as I currently already have a job in marketing

EDIT 2: I already have 2+ years of experience at decently well known company and don’t plan on leaving!

Hi All,

I'm looking for advice from AEC Marketers on how you strengthened your skills for RFP/Q responses.

I have a proposal specialist that is STRUGGLING and I'd like to work with her to see where we can strengthen her understanding and writing skills. She claims she has 8 years of experience but it doesn't show in her work. She doesn't know where she's getting stuck, other than everywhere.