The Breakout Role

Our field contains some of the most passionate, creative and forward-thinking people you’ll find anywhere. It's also not for the thin-skinned. Like any industry, it takes a lot of drive and work upfront to land that first job if you don’t have connections. But once you’re in, you’re in. It’s a small world. If you do interesting work, people will notice.

You likely have tons of questions on how to make it happen, especially in this new landscape of remote work, COVID policies, and cultural trends that move at the speed of light. We sat down to answer those questions most students, recent grads and newcomers to advertising are afraid to ask.

A day in the agency life

One main question we’ve heard from students and recent grads is: who the hell works at an agency? It’s hard to generalize since every place can be drastically different, but a few departments you’ll see in a large, full-service agency are:

• Accounts: they lead and manage the projects, addressing any client concerns along the way. They ensure the campaigns make sense for the client’s goals. This is where you see titles like account executive, manager, coordinator, director and more.
• Strategy: they do the research, stay on top of trends and help guide accounts and creative to an interesting concept that still meets objectives. People in this department tend to have a focus like social or creative strategy. Sometimes, they may be found across other teams instead of forming their own.
• Media: they handle the planning, placement, and usually measurement of a campaign. Sometimes they are combined with a digital media team, and sometimes they’re separate. They have titles like media planner, supervisor and director, and usually do some form of strategy work as well.
• Creative: they take all that information from strategy, media and accounts and turn it into concepts that blend visuals and language in new, compelling ways. This involves people like art directors, designers, copywriters and creative directors.
• Production: they make the creative concepts happen IRL, particularly video or photo content. A lot of agencies outsource their production, but some do this in-house. This can include animators, filmmakers, VFX artists and essentially anyone you’d see on a film set.

Much like other businesses, agencies will usually have an executive or operations team at the top whose roles can vary widely. Larger agencies may also have entire departments for administrative help or new business. To give you a small glimpse inside some of these teams, we asked Black Sheep...

What do some of your everyday tasks look like?

Bill, Art Director 
“I would say every day involves *some* amount of design work, but it's a wide range of tasks both on and off the computer. Most of my day is typically spent making. I spend a good amount of time sketching and generating ideas in my notebooks, flipping through books and magazines and scrolling through design inspiration websites, and hanging out with my best-software-friends Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to create design pieces... I also do a fair amount of concept writing for presentations... and I'm in meetings as well!”

Danuta, Account Director
“Project managing a range of web, digital and brand/strategy development projects, communicating with clients and project stakeholders and collaborating with cross-disciplinary teams.”

Caitlin, Digital Director
“Engaging on social media, tracking organic and paid social metrics, creating digital strategy plans for clients and collaborating on creative direction for campaign and brand work.”

Torey, Community Strategist
“Social listening online and making sure I'm up-to-date with the latest discourse, cultural research and investigating, lots of writing. I spend a lot of time hosting interviews, writing interview questions or hosting focus groups to make sure that our strategy for a client is inclusive of the people we are serving. I secret shop to dig deeper into user journeys and user sentiments...with my favorite secret shopping endeavor being when I did a fake interview for a client. I also do a lot of writing for clients who might have more of a culture-focused tone or voice.”

What did you do before you joined Black Sheep?

Only five people said they had a job doing some kind of advertising work, while the rest of us have had some storied careers. Responses ranged from working for a “dark money political group” (do with that what you will), Whole Foods and being a student intern.

This seems to be good news that’s shared across the industry, especially on the more creative side. Agencies value having employees with unique backgrounds — at least, the ones who value doing cool and interesting work. It can be a selling point if you started in another field or have a degree in something wildly different.

What were some pros and cons of these different advertising roles?

Our creative team chimed in on the two most common environments: in-house and agency life.

When it comes to in-house work: “Pros: clear mission/goals, having a strong understanding of the product/service, being able to test things more frequently, consistent workload, no-outside-client-management, less creative-blocks-stress. The cons: things start feeling repetitive, harder to experiment with new techniques, could be limited in career growth if it's a small organization.”

As for smaller agencies, “Pros: I learned how to work fast and learn how to work directly with clients. And I had a lot of creative control. This role also helped me develop some great collaboration skills with the web developer and video editor. Cons: Since we were such a small team, I didn't have a creative director to watch out for me in the creative process. There was a lot of ‘hovering art director’ type situations, except the art directors were my boss and the CLIENTS.”

What was the biggest learning curve for you at your first advertising job?

Kellen, Strategist
“There's almost never a ‘right’ answer, so learning to overcome feeling like you can't find the right answer is tough!”

Jordan, Creative Director
“Intelligence and flat-out skill doesn't get you as far as getting along with the people you work with. That being said, we work in a world that actively values white supremacy, misogyny, etc. so you just have to do your best until you have enough.”

Alex, Creative Strategist
“The biggest learning curve for me was understanding the processes. I had to learn how to ask deeper questions, challenge my assumptions, and stop pretending that I had all the answers (the result of my perfectionism). I had to learn to be okay with a little trial and error, and ask for what I need! It was also hard to ‘catch up’ on every client at the start, especially when writing for them because it had to feel like a seamless transition from the previous writers.”

Finally, what skills have been the most helpful in this field?

Danuta, Account Director
“For Accounts/Client Service/PM folks: Strong anticipation skills. This part of advertising requires you to always be ten steps ahead, to see the details AND the big picture—and not just from your vantage point. You're constantly navigating complexity, shifts and the unexpected, and having a pulse on the agency and what's going on in the client's world is critical... It's easy to get stuck in a ‘we must meet the deadline’ kind of mindset, but I would encourage accounts folks to develop their relationships just as much as their technical expertise. If you have great partnerships with your team and clients, most of those project obstacles can be resolved in a way that doesn't cause burnout or negatively impact relationships.”

Caitlin, Digital Director
“Being able to separate your work from your character/creativity. Trusting the expertise of others—it is great to be curious and hungry and have ideas, but it's equally as important to ask questions and assume you have more to learn.”

Natalie, Strategy Director
“Project management, hands down. Regardless of your role, you need to know how to plan your days/weeks, you need to know how to juggle lots of priorities and deadlines, you need to know how to manage people—up, down and across—and you need to be great at selling ideas, pushing back, holding boundaries and communicating with clients. These are all PM skills! Employers are looking for this still all over the creative industry, and it's unfortunately pretty rare and not taught in most comms or creative programs.”

Aimee, CEO
“Curiosity! The genuine desire to keep learning, to try new things, to experiment. One of the things someone said to me at a previous job was: ‘We've never done this before, so I'm not sure how we'd do it. Stick to the way we usually do it—we make more money that way.’ I'll never forget it because the second they said it, I knew I had to quit. The whole point of the work we do is to adventure into new territory and try things we've never tried before. A willingness to take risks is half the battle. The other half is talent and hard work.”