BroxtenDigital
What does a marketing agency do? It does the marketing work a company cannot do with its own people, which means the job is to give the client what they need, and that is rarely the exact thing they asked for.
That is the answer from Tim Kilroy, who has started three agencies, sold two, and hired agencies as CMO of Karmaloop. I work inside an agency and I still wanted a straighter answer than the one on the website, so I asked him.
What does a marketing agency do for a client?
Tim's version starts with why the client is there at all. "The reason why they are working with an agency is because they don't have the in-house skills or the in-house staff to be able to do the stuff that you do," he said. If you only hand back what they requested, they could have done it themselves.
His example comes from his own time as the client. At Karmaloop his customers had their own vocabulary. "Google at that point didn't know that kicks were sneakers or a lid was a hat," he said. He wanted his ads next to every Wiz Khalifa video on YouTube, because that is where his audience was. His agency kept steering him back to best practices for the platform. "I was bringing culture to the agency. It's gotta be the other way around."
Working on your next move? Leaders from Publicis Media, Spotify, Paramount and more share how they got there. Subscribe on YouTube.
How do you get promoted at work inside an agency?
Tim called the jump from team lead to director the hardest cut in an agency, with the most people competing for the fewest seats. His read on what decides it surprised me.
"The difference between you being a team lead and an account director is not how good of a marketer you are," he said. "It all has to do with how well you lead and communicate." Knowing the platforms is necessary. It will not separate you. His advice for standing out is to take on every responsibility you can and own the outcome.
How do you take initiative at work without waiting for permission?
From age five to our early twenties, school hands us the assignment and tells us how it will be graded. Tim's line: "Business does not run that way." A stressed-out account director has no time to tell you which column the number goes in.
His fix is one note to your boss: I'm going to follow up with this client at four o'clock, here is what I'm going to say, unless you tell me differently. You took ownership, and they still have the chance to say no. He sees a lot of early-career people who are, in his words, "so afraid to do the wrong thing that it feels safer to do nothing." When you are stuck, ask yourself what your boss would tell you to do next, then do that.
Is your boss supposed to be your mentor?
Not necessarily, and this one took some pressure off. "You can't always depend on your immediate supervisor to be a mentor, because often they're just one or two steps ahead of you," Tim said. If they are leading a team, it is probably their first time doing it.
His move is to go sideways: find another director, tell them their work looks interesting, and ask how they approach it. "You just want to be asking them for information, never for help. Help has to be offered."
Watch the full conversation
Tim also covers why agencies play defense with their own clients, why optimizing to one metric makes every ad look the same, and how to defend a decision that went wrong: What Does A Marketing Agency Do? An Agency Founder Turned Consultant's Answer.
Watch next: Jobs In Advertising, Explained: Every Seat And Where To Start
If Tim's four o'clock note is going in your toolkit, Subscribe on YouTube for a new video every Friday.