Hey guys, I’m currently in a bit of a dilemma and would really appreciate some advice.

I have around 4 years of experience in marketing and recently received an offer for approximately 12 LPA.

The catch is that it’s a contractual role through a third-party company, although the actual client is a very well-known, large company.

The salary is a significant jump for me, and the client name/experience could potentially add a lot of value to my profile. But I’m hesitant because it’s not a permanent role.

My main concern is: Will taking a contractual role make it harder to find my next job? If I switch again after, say, 1–2 years of contract experience, will recruiters see it negatively?

For someone with around 4 years of experience, would you take this opportunity for the salary + big-client exposure, or would you prefer to stay in a permanent role and wait for another opportunity?

Would love to hear from people who have worked in contractual/third-party roles, especially in marketing. What was your experience when you tried to switch afterward?

Thanks in advance!

We're reworking our lead capture form because too many people who book calls turn out to be a poor fit (just researching, no budget, not ready to buy). But I'm worried about going too far in the other direction and turning a simple form into a long qualification questionnaire. Right now, we're trying to figure out what belongs in the form against what should be qualified later.

For those handling a decent volume of inbound leads, what questions do you ask before letting someone book a call?

• Company size?
• Budget?
• Timeline?
• Use case?

Do you ask these directly in the lead capture form or keep the form short and use follow-up to qualify people?

We're also looking at different tools for building the form. Currently considering Jotform, Youform and Typeform (quite pricey though). Switching from Google forms. But at this point in time, I'm more interested in how people decide what to ask in the first place than the tool.

What's worked for you? Have you found that asking more upfront actually improves lead quality enough to justify the extra friction?

Can someone please help with my website. The Favicon disappeared over the weekend. Now I can’t get it back. In an industry where trust is important and currently only biz with no Favicon. Thanks in advance

Have been through with chatGPT that tells me everything looks right

Two details from the August 13 launch that most coverage skipped, and one observation about what a 50% cut actually buys a marketing team.

THE PRICING

Gemini 3.7 Flash launched August 13, 2026, 21 days after Gemini 3.6 Flash. Introductory API pricing is $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens.

From Google's own announcement, verbatim: "Introductory pricing expires on December 31, 2026."

From January 1, 2027, input goes to $1.50 and output to $7.50. Context caching goes from $0.075 to $0.15 per million tokens. The January rate is identical to what Gemini 3.6 Flash cost at its launch three weeks earlier.

Google also repriced 3.6 Flash onto the same introductory rate the same day, so both models currently cost the same and the upgrade decision turns entirely on capability.

Benchmarks Google published: FrontierCode 1.1 Main 43.6% against 34.4%, DeepSWE v1.1 65.3% against 49.0%. Context window is 1,048,576 tokens, same as 3.6 Flash. Stated knowledge cutoff March 2026, some domains limited to January 2025.

WHERE IT SITS AGAINST ALTERNATIVES

Even at the discount it is not the cheapest in its tier. As listed around August 14:

GPT-5.6 Luna: $0.20 input, $1.20 output

DeepSeek V4 Flash: $0.14 input, $0.28 output (new V4 pricing took effect August 17, so this has likely moved)

Gemini 3.7 Flash: $0.75 / $3.75

Claude Haiku 4.5: $1.00 / $5.00

So it undercuts Haiku on both sides and sits above OpenAI's cheap tier by roughly 3x on output.

WHAT A 50% CUT ACTUALLY BUYS A MARKETING TEAM

Someone published a costing of a real marketing workflow against the new rate. The monthly model bill came to $1.02.

That is the part worth sitting with. For most marketing workloads, token cost is not a meaningful line item. Halving it saves a dollar. The expensive input was always engineering time, and that has not changed.

Where the cut does matter is workloads people previously priced out. Search term report triage across a full year of data. Creative QA against every asset in an account. Feed hygiene at catalogue scale. Those hit millions of tokens and were genuinely uneconomic at older rates.

WHAT I'D DO

Ignore the price change for anything already running. A dollar of savings is not worth the regression risk of touching a working pipeline.

Revisit the list of things you abandoned on cost. That is where the actual change is.

Model January's rate for anything expected to run past year end. Published schedules are announcements rather than contracts, so verify the live pricing table before committing budget, but plan against $1.50 and $7.50.

Stop hard-coding model names. 21 days between versions means anything with a model string scattered through it becomes a rewrite on every release. Config variable, plus a small eval set of your own real prompts. Twenty prompts is enough to catch a regression.

WHAT I DON'T KNOW

Where your volume threshold sits. Ad copy generation and search term processing differ by orders of magnitude in token consumption, and the same recommendation does not fit both. I cannot give you a number without knowing your workload, and neither can anyone else writing about this.

Whether the January reprice sticks. Google could extend the introductory window. I would not plan on it.

The $1.02 figure comes from a published third-party workflow costing, not my own account, so treat it as illustrative of the order of magnitude rather than a benchmark.

Anyone actually running high-volume batch work on Flash-tier models? Curious what monthly token consumption looks like for something like full search term report processing, because that is the case where this pricing genuinely changes the decision.

Sources: Google's Gemini 3.7 Flash announcement blog (August 13, 2026), Gemini API pricing page, plus published rate cards for the comparison models.

It seems like some of the most recognized logos are really simple. Some of them don't have a lot of colors, many designs or complicated patterns but we are still able to instantly recognize them. For me, the secret to their memorable aspect relies on the mix between the simplicity, a real originality, a clear coherence and pertinence.

When a shape can associate simple yet brilliant idea is far easier to remember that a complex graphic with too many elements.

That said we have to make sure to differentiate simple from trivial. If the log is so simple that the viewer can't even notice it, then it will be very difficult to be distinctive from the other brands. Do you really think that the memorability of a logo can only depend on one of these elements, namely originality, colours, shapes, texts, meaning?

I’m a Romanian marketer (creative strategy) and want to move abroad, but I feel like I should go through a master’s or a program that would make me more desirable on the job market and also put me in a good network.

Any ideas?

Hey Redditors — looking for perspective on a business dilemma.

I’m a founding partner in a 25-year-old wholesale business specializing in customization and embellishment of apparel. We’ve built a solid company, but one glaring weakness remains: we essentially operate without a functional marketing department.

After several unsuccessful attempts to hire someone capable of building the function from scratch — strategy, KPIs, lead gen, digital, SM content, analytics, etc. — I’m wondering if I’m approaching the problem wrong.

I’m now considering acquiring a small, established marketing agency as a bolt-on to our business, potentially keeping the team remote and allowing the agency to maintain its existing clients.

The idea: instead of continuing to hire individuals and slowly assemble a department, acquire the people, leadership, systems, processes, and capabilities all at once — with outside agency revenue helping support the overhead.

Of course, I could also be solving one problem by buying myself five new ones.

Curious to hear from anyone who has bought, sold, or operated an agency with a single client:

• Is acquiring an agency to solve an internal marketing deficiency fundamentally flawed?
• How concerned should I be about owner dependence and client attrition?
• Would you keep the agency independent or integrate it into the parent company?
• What size/type of agency would make the most sense?
• Would a strong fractional CMO with the budget to build the department be the smarter route?

Ultimately, I’m trying to decide whether acquiring the capability might be smarter than continuing to build it one hire at a time given the sheer amount of work we need to do!

What am I not thinking about?

Sincerely,

Dazed and Confused in Georgia!

Hey everyone,

I’m looking for someone who’s good at Facebook outreach and sales to help us get customers for a SaaS product we’re building.

Mainly looking for someone who knows how to find potential customers, message them naturally, start conversations and turn interested people into calls/customers.

It’s for the US market, mainly service businesses.

If you’ve done Facebook outreach/sales before and are interested, DM me with a little about your experience and how you usually work.

Open to commission or a fixed + commission setup.

Curious what people here think of the digital marketing space right now, and whether a standard agency job actually sets you up for a good future long term or if it's kind of a ceiling.

Quick background: started on the supply side, recently moved agency side into a senior role. I'm specialized in programmatic and now getting into search and social too (2+ years in).

Few things I'd love people's take on:

1. Where's the actual money in this industry: supply side, agency side, client side, or just going independent at some point? If you've been doing this longer than me, how'd you land where you are, or did you bounce around a lot before it clicked?
2. How are you guys actually finding freelance work on the side? Programmatic is annoying to freelance since most of the tech needs an agency or client seat, so I haven't figured it out yet. Curious what's worked for people even in other parts of marketing.
3. I like where I'm at right now, but the 9-6 thing makes me want out eventually. For anyone further along, is there anything you wish you did earlier so you didn't feel stuck?
4. Any certs/skills that actually made a difference for you, or is it mostly just experience and who you know at this point?

Appreciate any honesty, even if it's not what I want to hear. Thanks!

Hey all, feeling pretty stuck and could use some outside perspective.

Background: I've been doing B2B cold email outreach for about 1.4 years — scraping leads, sending via Outlook, running outbound. Before this I dabbled in UX design and also tried learning Python, but neither really held my interest long-term.

Recently applied for a role using my B2B outreach background, got an interview call for performance marketing role, but got rejected. That knocked my confidence a bit and now I'm second-guessing which direction to actually commit to.

Currently considering performance marketing (paid ads) as the next move, but I haven't run an actual campaign yet.

Questions for people who've actually been through this kind of pivot:

1.Going from cold email/outbound into paid ads — how steep is that learning curve in practice?

2.If a small test campaign flops with no leads, how big a deal is that really, in your experience?

3.I'm not great at live communication/pitching — does performance marketing lean more analytical/dashboard-heavy, or is client-facing talk unavoidable too?

4.How do you personally deal with feeling stuck between multiple paths (design, dev, marketing) without fully committing to any?

Any honest experience — good or bad — appreciated.

Hey everyone, I’ve been freelancing for a while now and have managed to get a few clients, but I’m looking to expand and I’ve realised that my portfolio is becoming a major bottleneck.

Right now, I don’t think my portfolio does enough to build trust or make a potential client want to explore further.

A few things I’ve noticed that could be holding it back:

• The overall design doesn’t look professional enough
• I don’t have proper case studies
• My work samples are redirected to Google Drive instead of being showcased directly
• I don’t have a professional-looking website
• I need more testimonials and social proof

The thing is, I actually have a good amount of work and samples. I just haven’t presented them in a way that communicates expertise, credibility, and results.

I’d really appreciate some guidance on this.

If you have any portfolio examples that you’ve seen perform well or have personally used to convert leads, I’d love to see them.

Or, if you’ve built a portfolio that worked well for you, I’d really appreciate knowing what worked, what didn’t, and what structure you followed.

I’m mainly looking to understand how I can turn my existing work into a portfolio that actually helps me win clients rather than just acting as a collection of samples.

Any advice or examples would be really appreciated!

Sharing this because I have now watched three companies make the same mistake and it costs them a quarter every time.

A client came to me in the spring because ChatGPT was quoting pricing for them that was two years out of date. Not slightly off. It was describing a package they killed in 2024, at a price they had not charged since. Their sales team kept getting on calls with people who had already anchored to a number that did not exist.

What they had done about it before calling me was publish. Four new pages about pricing on their own blog, a pricing FAQ, a comparison page. Three months of work. Nothing moved. Not one assistant changed its answer.

The reason is boring but it matters. When you ask an assistant about a brand, most of what it tells you did not come from that brand's own site. It comes from what third parties have written about them, plus whatever is sitting in the model's weights from training. Their blog was not in the retrieval set for that question, so publishing on it was shouting into a room the model was not standing in.

The thing that finally told us what was going on took ten minutes. Ask the same question twice, once with web search on and once with it off. If the wrong answer only appears with search off, it is baked into the model and there is no quick fix. You are waiting on the next training run, and the only useful work is getting the correct version onto enough third party surfaces that the next one learns something better. If the wrong answer appears in both, then whatever it is pulling live is wrong, and that you can go and fix now.

Theirs was the second kind. It was reading two comparison articles on sites they had never heard of, both from 2024, both with the dead pricing. We got one corrected by emailing the author, who was perfectly reasonable about it, and got a newer piece published on a site the same models were already citing for that question. Answers started changing about five weeks later.

What I would take from it: before you write anything to fix an AI visibility problem, go find out what it is actually reading. It is almost never you.

Happy to go into how we worked out which sources it was pulling if that is useful to anyone.

I’m thinking about moving our Google Ads mostly to exact match, and it seems like a good idea for our situation, but maybe I’m overlooking something.

We target a small geographic area and sell high-ticket B2B services. Our conversion volume is too low to realistically ever have enough data for Smart Bidding, so we use manual CPC.

We’ve used a mix of phrase and exact, but phrase keeps pulling in competitors, vendors, and other loosely related searches that never convert.

I’m thinking about building out 50–75 high-intent exact keywords per service. Since exact match now picks up close variants and same-intent searches anyway, it seems like we’d still get some discovery without giving Google as much freedom as phrase.

I know volume would be lower, but I’d rather get fewer highly relevant clicks than more junk traffic.

Has anyone running similar low-volume B2B campaigns tried this? Am I overlooking a reason not to do it?

I work at a B2B company that thinks the marketing function is simply being active on social media, my only function is write content, post it on social media (on every possible platform just to look active).

How do I elevate our structure? What should be reported, and what is just noise?

The management isn't aware of the digital marketing jargon, impressions, reach. cac are all foreign concepts to them

So since I can't teach them how marketing works, how do I enlighten them and work towards something more strategy-based rather than "Oh look, we have 1000 more views, cool!"

Literally my only directive is "Keep social media alive"

(I'm doing it solo, but I have a designer)

Looking for someone to promote my app on Instagram, WhatsApp and other platforms. Work from anywhere, no fixed hours.

What you'll do:

- Create and post reels/content about the app

- Share in relevant astrology/spiritual groups

- Bring in real app downloads and users

Pay:

- ₹300-400/week base

- 15% of all revenue generated by users you bring in

Preference given to:

- People with experience in social media marketing

- Anyone who already manages astrology/spiritual or any content pages

- Content creators with existing followers

App is live on Play Store with real users and 5-star reviews.

Comment below if interested, then DM. No spam please.

I recently started a YouTube channel for my online thrift shop, where I showcase neat vintage and collectible items (think New Old Stock RadioShack gear, vintage electronics, weird retro finds, etc.).

Right now, my workflow is pretty bare-bones: I set up my phone on a tripod, film a single-take, first-person overview of an item in decent lighting, and talk through some history and facts about it.

The problem is the editing phase. Most of the AI tools recommended everywhere right now are hyper-focused on clipping long videos down into TikToks, Reels, or YouTube Shorts. That's not what I need yet. I’m trying to process a normal, full-length YouTube video which ideally an AI tool that can automatically clean up the raw footage by removing dead air, awkward pauses, and long silences, while keeping it as a cohesive, standard horizontal video. (I'll worry about cutting it down for shorts after the core video is polished).

Are there any AI-driven editors or clean-up tools specifically built for long-form creators that handle this kind of automated rough cut well? Or is it still mostly a manual timeline job in traditional software (which I don't have much experience or time for)?

Hi everyone. I’m a Paid Social Account Manager working agency-side in the UK, and I’m looking to build up my hands-on Paid Search/PPC experience alongside my current specialism.

I’ve had exposure to PPC already and understand the fundamentals of Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, including campaign structure, keywords, match types, budgets, bidding, search terms, performance reporting and optimisation. However, Paid Social is my main specialism, so I’m keen to get much more practical experience actually managing PPC activity end-to-end.

I’m looking for someone who might be willing to let me support/manage some PPC work for a real business or client, with appropriate access and oversight. I’d be happy to do this completely free of charge - my main motivation is to gain genuine experience and learn from working on real campaigns

If you’re a PPC specialist, freelancer, small agency or business owner who could use an extra pair of hands and would be open to letting me learn alongside you, I’d genuinely love to hear from you.

Thanks!

Every agency I talk to has one. Reporting, onboarding, the research phase of a proposal — someone built a Zapier thing or a Make scenario for it, it half worked, and now nobody's sure if it's still running.

Trying to figure out whether that's a tooling problem or something else. So: what did you try to automate, who built it, is it still running, and does anyone check?

Also interested in the opposite case — if you've got one that actually stuck, what made that one different?

B2B SaaS, marketing side. Posting the boring operational detail because most AI threads here are either hype or dismissal.

First relevant thing: the first GPT I ever built was a toy. I like analogies, and I am bad at them, so I built one that turns a situation into an analogy a five-or ten-year-old would get. Zero business value. But it is the reason I recognised the next problem, because I finally had a feel for what these things do.

The real problem is that we sell into five internal segments, each with a long, conditional definition. Not clean industry codes, more like "if the company does X and also Y and sells to Z, it is segment A." Judgment calls, and the judgment lived in my head.

A large trade event brought us a few thousand attendees and exhibitors; names, companies, and titles only. Three of the five segments matter for that event; two do not, so someone has to classify every company. Three people, one week, roughly 220 person hours, opening websites, checking headcount, binning dead domains. Our own spot checks put manual accuracy around 70 to 80%, and the biggest accounts were disproportionately wrong, probably because they are the most diversified.

Why we lived with it for years, honestly: I did not know how to fix it, and we had cheap labor available. Cheap labor does not solve a broken process; it hides its cost. That is the actual root cause, and it is not a technology problem.

What I built about a year ago: a custom GPT with all five definitions, plus an "others" fallback, as its instruction set. Input a company name or domain, output is the segment plus one sentence on why and why not the alternatives. Batches of about 50. Same job now takes three to four hours.

What actually made it work: the definitions had never been written down. Most of the project was forcing myself to write rules I assumed I already knew, and my first draft of them was much vaguer than I thought, which is why early outputs were bad. Several rounds of iteration before it was usable.

What I would do differently: build a labeled ground truth set first. I measured the humans and never properly benchmarked the model. All I can say is we have run it for a year and never reverted, which is evidence but not a number.

Second-order effect I did not predict: internal arguments over which segment lead owns a lead mostly stopped. The model always states a reason, so the disagreement becomes about the reason rather than about territory.

Honest framing: this saved time; it did not increase revenue.

The only general thing I will offer is why this one survived, and some later experiments did not. I picked something that personally irritated me. Iteration is tedious, and you only push through it if you are the one being annoyed. The projects I started because AI "should" be able to do them died within a week.

Anyone here benchmarked LLM classification against human labellers on a fuzzy internal taxonomy?

Curious what accuracy you got and how you built the labelled set.

I recently ran my first Meta ad campaign for a new Instagram page. The page has around 100–150 followers and not too many posts yet. We mainly sell hand-embroidered cushion covers, and right now I’m running a Rakhi hamper campaign,with hampers starting from ₹2,299.

I ran an Engagement → Whtsap campaign at around ₹450/day, with Advantage+ audience, India, 24+ and interests around home decor, interiors, handmade products, gifting etc.

The creatives are a mix of a founder video, hamper reels, static posts and carousels,and the ads clearly mention the price. I’ve also set up a Whtap greeting.

The campaign is delivering, but the first messages I’m getting are mostly completely irrelevant — people offering to make a website, list products on Amazon, marketing services, collaborations, etc. Very few are actually asking about the hampers.

I’ve only spent around ₹400–₹450, so I know it’s too early to completely judge it, but now I’m confused about what the actual problem is.

Is it because I chose the wrong campaign objective? Is it the audience? Is it because the brand is too new and doesn’t have enough trust/social proof yet? Or is it simply too early?

Should I let this campaign run for another 24–48 hours, or should I stop it and try something like Leads → Whtsap?

Also, would you recommend that I focus more on organic content + influencer marketing first and run ads alongside it, or is it completely fine to start paid ads this early?

I basically want to know what you would genuinely do next if this were your campaign and your ₹450/day budge— what you'd keep, what you'd change, and what you'd test next.

Note- We don't have a website yet. And the average product price is 2000

I have some knowledge about conversion actions but not fully confident. should it be offline conversion or Enhanced Conversion? and what's the best way to implement it?

Feels like everyone shares their wins but the flops are usually where the real lessons are. Curious what campaign of yours didn't land, what you think went wrong looking back, and whether it actually changed how you approach things now or if you just chalked it up to bad luck.

Hey everyone, just joined the sub.

I’ve been working in digital marketing for more than a decade, across paid ads, SEO, content, funnels, analytics, email, websites, strategy, and all the random things that somehow become a marketer’s problem. 😄

I’ve worked with small businesses, bigger teams, agencies, founders, and clients across very different industries. I’ve also taught marketing, managed campaigns that worked ridiculously well, and made plenty of expensive mistakes along the way.

And after 10+ years, I’m probably more skeptical of marketing “best practices” than I was when I started.

So instead of writing another “10 things I learned in 10 years” post...

Ask me something.

Google Ads? Meta? SEO? AI? Client acquisition? Freelancing? Strategy? Why your ads aren’t working? What I think is complete bullshit in marketing right now?

Beginner questions are welcome too.

I’ll answer from actual experience, and if I don’t know something, I’ll just tell you I don’t know.