Agency Experience Vs. Brand Experience

Understanding the dichotomy of hiring a person with Agency experience versus Brand experience for a digital marketing role

When hiring a member for the Digital Marketing team, one of the recurrent dilemmas leaders face is whether to hire an Agency person(Type -1) or a person with Brand experience(Type - 2).

While the preferences like College, B2B/B2C, and even years of experience are openly mentioned in the job description, the choice of Brand or Agency experience is usually muted there.

But this is a very common preference. Hiring managers often give direct input to the HR team to not choose a person with a certain background. While this is not mentioned in the job description, this criterion is often used in shortlisting resumes.

In my experience of interviewing more than 100 candidates from junior to manager roles, they are notable differences between type-1 and type-2 people.

While they are different, no one is better than the other. They are just shaped by different environments, needs and constraints of their experience over the years.

A top difference you will notice immediately is "Breadth Vs. Depth."

• Type-1 will have a breadth of experience.

• While type-2 people with brand experience have more depth.

You can work with more than ten different accounts simultaneously while working for an agency. You will never get that scope with brands.

Due to the above work nature, type-1 people have experience with most of the possible scenarios in campaign optimization, campaign performance and competitive strategies. Hence they tend to respond faster when something goes wrong or even right by a big margin.

On the contrary, type-2 people work to make the campaign successful no matter what. They analyze how other channels performed during the same period and assess whether any external factors are affecting the whole business. So they tend to dig deeper into available metrics when the campaign didn't move in the planned direction.

It is also because of the luxury of having access to all the internal data and dashboards, which are usually not shared with the agency teams.

This brings us to another notable difference between the two people.

Type-1 people with agency experience are more process-oriented, while those with the brand are more outcome-oriented.

While handling dozens of accounts gives varied experience, you have to strictly follow a set structure and process to manage them effectively. So type-1 people are methodical in running & managing things and always well organized.

And as per my personal experience, they are comparatively better at playing with numbers in MS Excel.

On the other hand, type-2 people spend more time on whether they have achieved the planned business outcome. Because they know what the Ad dashboard says doesn't matter to the organization's senior leadership. Overall, business outcomes only matter.

So how things panned out post-hiring?

In my career, I mostly worked with brands. So I will share my experience in hiring people with agency experience to the team.

Things got streamlined. From campaign naming to campaign planning, daily reports to weekly reports, and optimization analysis to documentation. Everything got streamlined.

But only with the Ads dashboard data. They were less interested in getting the data beyond the attributed numbers. They tend to complain about the difficulties and inefficiencies in obtaining and managing the full funnel data from other tools and internal teams.

A notable example was incrementality dashboards. They are usually messy. Because they are observation-based, and type-1 people hate them.

So, how should you manage the interview discussion if you are a candidate with brand experience and interviewing for the agency or a person with agency experience interviewing for a brand?

With the points mentioned above, you can deduce them easily.

Show them you are organized when interviewing for an agency; Express that you look at the complete picture when interviewing for a brand.

Not just show; learn to do that too.

One person working with the agency said he got this question during an interview. He was given all the details about the client, their campaign portfolio, and their objectives. And was asked how he would name a campaign.

And it's true; good campaign naming conventions save a lot of time, especially when the campaign numbers are high.

Lastly, as a manager/founder, how should you plan after hiring someone with a particular background?

Let's say you hired someone with an agency background for your brand.

You'll need to clearly communicate your expectations to them with an example of what you expect while analyzing a problem.

Like this one.

If the conversion rate drops week on week, she/he should always check how other channels have behaved during the same period and check how this paid campaign performed relative to other channels. The same should be done when the campaign performs better WoW as well.

This is it. This is what I want to share.

Ohh, there is one more thing.

There is saying that goes as"Birds of same feather flock together". It is true for humans as well.

We all tend to gravitate towards people with similar backgrounds like us, primarily because of the fear of the unknown.

I have been like that in the past. But once you experience the true power of diversity, you will never return to your limiting belief.