.....you had enough money to not work for the foreseeable future? Asking for a friend. Or, is your love so great that you'd never quit?

The advice I always got, and have taken, is to work agency side out of school for several years then transition to in house/brand side. I’ve been in agencies for 7 years, I feel like I’m functioning at the rate of 5 brand siders put together lol. I want to move in house but it seems like brands only want people with brand experience?? Which is crazy to me… is anyone else getting this vibe??

I couldn’t take it anymore and wound up accepting a job at an agency on their corporate team, promoting the agency itself… not client facing work but it’s not what I really want to be doing either. I just needed a client break lol. Been here 6 months now, miss being consumer facing, don’t want to go back to agency work. Advice for moving to brand side much appreciated

Hi everyone! Hope this question fits well here.

Basically I graduated as 3D generalist but I’ve learned the hard way in this industry a degree means nothing. The job market for this sector in my country (anim for video games/film) is extremely small and pretty much impossible to get in, so i pivoted into advertising.

I’ve worked in a bunch of different design tasks from 3d design for stands and printing/laser cutting for marketing events, to motion graphics for led screens and such, but due to personal reasons i had to quit my job last year and I’ve been struggling to find another opening.

It’s always been a personal goal of mine to move overseas (I like the UK) and I’ve thought about getting a masters in advertising and design but I’m worried I’ll run into the same issue of my degree being worth nothing and having spent a bunch of money on something that won’t help me. Is pursuing a masters worth it? What do you guys recommend?

I'm in my fifth month of media buying and I want to improve. I'm handling a US LLC company and I'm from a third world country. I got extremely lucky to have this job while being a CS undergrad and not having a single clue what a media buyer is before. So, I'm learning on the job and through YouTube.

I'm getting a hang of my daily tasks which are just launching campaigns/ads and managing their budgets base on SOPs. I created an app for generating excel import for bulk uploads in ads manager. Also utilized automated rules for managing campaigns.

So since I have time saved, I want to upskill. Which YT channels do you recommend? And aside from those, do you have any course recommendations?

BTW, current YT channels I'm following now are: Mark Builds Brand, Sergio C, Alex Robinson, and Sam Piliero

I've handled a total of over $1.3m adspend. I know this amount of adspend is huge for my experience, but I also know my skills don't match it.

And lastly, I'm currently an in-house media buyer. If I get laid off, how should I look for another job? How do I leverage my experience and adspend when applying? And Is it better to try working at an agency first? What are its benefits and drawbacks?

Thank you!

Seriously - what?

I have been working in programmatic for nearly 6 years and now feel lost. I’ve only ever worked for the big agencies, but for the past six months I’ve been at a smaller agency and frankly hate it. The job market is depressing, know that other agencies have layoffs and low morale and so feel trapped, also not sure how this company are doing financially.

Would love to get out of this industry completely but even at 26 I’m feeling it‘s too late as most roles want you to hit the ground running.

Does anyone else feel this way?

I understand the basic concept of ToF, MoF, and BoF. Usually, ToF is for cold/prospecting audiences, then you retarget those people in MoF and BoF.

The part confusing me is retargeting abandoned carts or checkout drop-offs. For example, I create a Custom Audience of people who added to cart or started checkout but didn't purchase. I would expect my BoF campaign to only target those people.

However, Meta now shows the Custom Audience as "Your Suggestion" and says it may reach people beyond this audience.

Doesn't this defeat the purpose of retargeting? For example, if my BoF campaign has a 30% discount offer for abandoned carts, and Meta expands beyond that audience, could it end up showing this discount ad to completely cold audiences?

Wouldn't that reduce the effectiveness of having a funnel structure in the first place?

So I’ve finally got a few roles doing commission only sales roles doing new business for production and marketing agencies…. No experience though (lol) anyone get any tips or advice. If you’re a CMO any advice on convincing and converting?! Thanks in advance x

Hi, my media company which produces social and commercial content for companies looking to scale (focus in healthcare) is attending Ad Week for the first time. Our background is documentary and we’ve attended Real Screen in the past. I found sales and relationships from that always came from one on one meetings and invites for private parties where you got to network more closely. However, a lot of that was connected through agents like CAA. What’s the protocol for Ad Week and connecting with directors, VP of marketing blindly? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Ive heard theres a stigma surrounding these agencies and how they operate internally such as you gotta watch your back because everyone is there to screw you

I’m currently at an agency in a client facing performance role and only been there for a few months. I recently got pretty burnt out and started seriously considering leaving.

I ended up accepting an offer at another agency for a role focused more heavily on activation/specialization.

It was a meaningful pay bump and, on paper, seems like it could put me on a better path toward eventually becoming more of a strategic/people leader rather than being so client service focused.

But then my current agency came back with a significant counteroffer.

The thing is, the money was never the whole problem.
I genuinely like a lot of the people I work with and there are parts of my current role that I really enjoy and some of the more creative/fun parts of agency life.

I don’t enjoy constantly having to chase internal teams, push things along, deal with organizational issues, and feel like I’m responsible for getting everyone else to move. A lot of my frustration has been around process and how things actually get done.

My current leadership knows I’ve been struggling and basically asked me to give them another 6 months. They’ve acknowledged some of the issues and said they are working on them.

The new role is more specialized and gives me more control over the actual work with on platform media activation.

So I’m basically choosing between:
Stay: Better compensation than I originally had, people I like, client interaction, familiarity, and leadership that is actually trying to retain me as a performance account manager
Leave: Higher pay, a fresh start, more specialization/ownership as a supervisor, and potentially a stronger long-term path toward strategy and leadership

TLDR; For those of you who have been in agencies for a while: would you take the counteroffer and give it 6 months, or leave for the new opportunity? Especially interested in perspectives from people who moved from more generalist performance client service/CSM/account roles into more specialized activation or strategy roles.

Most of what I buy is on the usual platforms. Last week I ran a structured test on Telegram Ads because a client category keeps asking about it, and I came out with numbers I'd like a sanity check on.

Small budget (about €500 across 7 campaigns, ~28,000 impressions). I know that's not a test budget by this sub's standards. I'm posting because the pattern was consistent across all seven, not because the spend was meaningful.

How the platform is built, which matters for what follows:

• CPM auction, you bid per thousand impressions.
• Channel owners receive 50% of the ad revenue generated in their channel. This is documented in Telegram's own monetization announcement.
• Two targeting modes: pick specific channels, or give it a topic and a language and let it distribute.
• The advertiser gets no placement-level reporting at all. No breakdown of where impressions ran, no post-buy exclusion list. In topic mode you never learn which channels served your ad.

So: publisher rev share, no transparency, and an auction that rewards whoever converts best. If you've argued about MFA inventory in programmatic, you already know where this goes.

What I saw.

The topic-targeted campaign was the best performer on paper – 3.7% conversion versus ~1.2% for my handpicked-channel campaigns. It also ran at 14.4% CTR against 4.4% for the handpicked ones.

Then I compared the platform's numbers to reality. It reported ~200 conversions. My channel's net growth that day was about 30. Telegram's own channel analytics splits joins and departures – my baseline was 1–2 departures a day, and on delivery day it spiked to 155.

So the platform counted, and billed me for, roughly 200 conversions, most of which reversed within hours.

Two other signals, in case they're useful to anyone doing this kind of check:

Presence. I found accounts that joined during the campaign whose last-seen timestamps predated it by weeks. On Telegram, last-seen reflects presence — you can't join a channel without opening the app, and opening the app marks you online. An account acting through the API doesn't broadcast presence at all. Action without presence is a fairly clean signature.

Decay. My best handpicked campaign converted at 1.97% over the first ~1,100 impressions and 0.82% over the next ~2,400. A real, finite audience gets exhausted, and the curve shows it. Fraudulent supply doesn't decay because it isn't finite. I haven't seen anyone use the shape of the decay curve as a detection signal and I'm curious whether that's naive.

What I'm not claiming.

n=1 advertiser, one vertical, days of data, ~€500. I can describe an incentive structure and an observed pattern. I can't tell you who's responsible, and I'm not naming channels. There's also a competing explanation I can't fully rule out – some inventory may have real but junk audiences that habitually join and leave, no automation required. That would explain the churn but not the last-seen accounts.

My own biggest mistake: I didn't use a separate tracking link per campaign, so I can't attribute individual suspicious accounts to a specific placement. Don't repeat that.

The question.

Has anyone here actually audited Telegram Ads delivery rather than trusting the dashboard? And more generally – is a 50% publisher rev share with zero placement reporting just structurally unworkable, or are there platforms running that model cleanly that I should look at?

Happy to walk through the raw numbers in the comments.

I am making a project on meta ads and how it creates more jobs accross broder economics supply chain

Anyone who used meta ads can you help me

Or is anybody available for interview

I run marketing for a business that only serves a few cities, so national advertising is pretty useless for us. We'd love the credibility of being on tv, but traditional tv buying never made much sense because so much of the spend goes toward people who can’t even become customers.

I've been looking at CTV because the geo targeting seems way more practical for a local business.

For anyone running ads for dealerships, clinics, home services, gyms, etc. did local streaming tv perform well for you, or was it mostly a branding play?

Of all the things that piss me off about LinkedIn, nothing is more cringey than the “I wasn’t impacted, BUT I SEE YOU IF YOU WERE” posts after a layoff.

I’ve survived several rounds of layoffs during a 12 year tenure at one of my previous orgs. It fucking sucks watching friends and coworkers suddenly lose their jobs. But I’ve never felt the need to make a post about someone else losing their job while making damn sure everyone knows I still have mine.

If you actually want to support the people who got laid off, support them. Share their posts, make intros, send JDs, etc. You don’t need to announce that you survived first.
It’s such weird fucking status signaling disguised as empathy.

I know some of us absolutely have to play the LinkedIn game, but have some damn integrity.

I’ve been in paid social side for 10+ years. I’ve been with legacy IPG in Canada for last 5 years. Despite begging for years to change my role to more performance marketing, nothing happened. I’ve finally managed to get a job on client side where I will get to work on all 3 crafts instead of just paid social. I want to know what future does this hold? How can I move towards a more generalist marketing position instead of the paid niche? Also, my new salary is going to be 100K. What can I do to get to a higher salary in future? Should I do part time MBA? I feel like I am stuck in a certain profile which doesn’t pay that well. For context I’m 37 F with 2 young kids. So my time is limited and I’m unable to pick up any freelance work.

Hey everyone,

I’ve recently started looking for my next role after 10 years in advertising.

My background is primarily in copy, but over the years, it’s expanded into campaign thinking, content strategy, messaging, creative direction, IPs/formats, YouTube, and leading creative teams. Most recently, I was working at Group Head level.

I’m exploring senior roles across creative, copy, content, and brand communications.

India is my primary market, but I’m also exploring opportunities across APAC and Europe, and I’m open to relocating for the right role.

Curious to hear from people in the industry: which companies/agencies are actually hiring right now? If you’ve made a similar international move, I’d love to hear how you approached it.

I'm interviewing for a role at a global agency (in the likes of Omnicom, Publicis etc). It's literally my first interview after my first job working at a smaller agency - so apologies if this is a stupid question.

From what I understand, I would technically be employed by the agency, but the role is specifically dedicated to working with one particular client. The interesting part is that my interview is actually with the client, with the agency HR/recruitment also involved. They've confirmed it's not a contract role.

What I’m trying to understand is:

Would I basically be embedded in the client’s team day-to-day?

Who would actually be my reporting manager and who handles performance reviews, promotions, salary increases etc.?

If the client eventually ends its relationship with the agency, what normally happens to employees who were dedicated to that account?

How easy is it to move internally to other accounts if I want to work on something different later?

Would love to hear from anyone who has worked in a similar client-dedicated role at an agency. What was your experience like?

PS : Used AI to rephrase some parts.

Hello everyone!

I'm a digital marketing manager and I've always had copy writers in my previous companies for ads. I'd let them know the pillars and they'd draft a few ideas and then we tweak and proceed

I've recently joined a new company and my manager wants me to draft ad scripts for videos which I've never done before. I tried based on the requirements but she immediately said no these are not ad scripts and dont use AI. Now I genuinely don't know what direction to go with. This is for B2C / leads.

If anyone can help me, even like proof read or atleast guide me how to make a structure or something that could click my creative side to help on this will be highly appreciated

Thanks everyone!

As in, most ads make me hate the product more, instead of liking it.

For example, those kinds of mobile game ads, where the player is failing in the dumbest way? They do that to make you subconsciously think "this guy is stupid, I can do way better than him" and you end up downloading the game out of spite.

But for me, I just think "this guy is stupid, if the dev isn't smart enough to play the game why would he be smart enough to make it?" And I never fell for the ad, in fact it really annoyed me instead. And this was before I even knew about why they pretend to be stupid.

Maybe it's because I'm autistic lol, like I just apply logic to everything. Thus, every ad I see gets logic applied to it. If it doesn't end up making sense for me, it's shit and I never wanna see it again. But then that ad ends up wasting my brain energy cuz I have to think about it. And sometimes it ruins my mood. Glad I have an adblocker now :D

Unfortunately adblockers do not work on real life billboards :(

EDIT: I am not trying to start an argument or boost my ego. I'm actually curious

​

I keep seeing "look what I automated" posts impressive, but most solve problems nobody actually has.

I want to flip that. If you work in digital marketing (agency, in-house, freelance, doesn't matter):

What's the one repetitive, annoying task you still do manually every week the kind where you think "there has to be a better way," but haven't found one?

Could be reporting, lead follow-up, content scheduling, client onboarding, data pulling between tools, whatever. Doesn't have to sound impressive. The boring, small stuff is usually the most automatable.

Drop it in the comments even a rough description helps. Genuinely trying to learn what's actually worth building, not adding to the pile of flashy demos nobody needed.

First the Meta Glasses campaign, now the Clash Royale campaign. I’ll glide over the Spotify playlist thing that gave us absolutely nothing.
Where did all the bold creativity go???

People with no understanding of how ideas are generated, the late night pizza sessions, the human mind at work, decide arbitrarily how many hours creatives are allowed to think. Making ‘let’s stay later and make something great’ actually AGAINST policy? Is this insane? They say it costs the agency more money if a salaried employee puts in 49 hours instead of 40–but how? And when and why did what was a secretarial -admin post become in charge? None of them could create an advertising campaign if their mommy’s lives were at stake. I seriously doubt that Dan Wieden was told by somebody to stop thinking after a certain number of hours

I’m a Creative Director at a big multinational agency in India. I’ve been here almost 10 years. I started from a junior design role and worked my way up, so this was the dream for a long time.

But honestly I feel stuck.

The work doesn’t excite me anymore. It feels safe and repetitive and nowhere close to what I thought I would be doing at this stage. What bothers me more is the lack of real push for better work. It feels like everyone is just trying to get things out rather than make something actually good.

I keep seeing smaller agencies doing more interesting work with less people and more freedom. Meanwhile big agencies feel slow and controlled and honestly a bit drained creatively.

I recently got an opportunity in an experiential marketing and events company in India. It’s a known name. The work feels more real and on ground and that part is genuinely pulling me in.

At the same time I’m thinking if I should just move to the brand side for more stability and a different kind of growth.

Not sure what the right call is. Has anyone here been through something similar or made a switch like this

PS: Also in India the pay honestly feels all over the place. For the kind of hours people put in, it often feels like peanuts. There’s barely any real overtime culture or meaningful work-life balance support. You’re just expected to stay on and deliver whatever the job demands, no matter how long it takes.