I had the interesting position of working for  a top advertising agency in Uganda for a couple of years as head of IT. That made me both an insider (I worked there, was at the meetings, knew the successes and failures) but always an outsider (I wasn’t part of the core creative/marketing business). So I can probably share a couple of interesting bits from that perspective.

Agency work is unlike any other business I’ve been involved with. They tend to work hard & even play harder! When there is a pitch the next day, they’d retreat to the boardroom for a brainstorm and sometimes never came out till late in the night. Now in my experience, those were the best days, I’d have a rest from the routine stress calls from some Nancy (not real name) in Client Service who would always mess something up on her computer…. I always wondered how she got on  with her clients with that attitude (there is a time she summoned me because she didn’t remember the folder in which she’d saved her work and went on to give me this “you are the I.T guy, you are supposed to know everything, find it!” look …SMH). It wasn’t uncommon too, that on such days booze freely flowed throughout office. The few times I attended the brainstorms turned out to be interesting for the most part (my contribution was always minimal, an occasional fix when the projector is acting up, usually was all I ever did). But for the rest of the team it was like their lives depended on their opinions, sometimes debates would become so heated, people would storm out in rage…. It was that intense, interestingly the ones that usually lace their sentences with jargon such as BLT, TA and ROI (God bless their little souls) always got offended the most whenever their ideas were snubbed.

Furthermore, clients want to control the creative process, something they know little or nothing about, and have no problem telling you that your idea sucks.

My agency did a lot of peer-reviews, so if you were on the creative side you spent a lot of time justifying your ideas to your peers as well, which can be both intimidating and exhilarating.

But all in all, an agency has an interesting assortment of people working within it, from button-down “suits “in client service and admin, to sandal-wearing “creatives” who are the main product. In between, you have copy writers and graphics designers, print production, web developers along with the usual accounting and technology support groups. If you join a big agency it might include PR and direct and experiential marketing groups. So the end of year party is a collection of people whose jobs, in many ways, differ wildly from each other, but who all have the same goal in mind.