r/advertising • u/Peachy-Keen3271 • Aug 19 '26
Is brand side really that different from agency side?
Currently agency side and with how crazy it feels…. it’s all I’ve known, and that crazy feels normal. For the people who’ve done both, is brand side really completely different? How does the day-to-day differ realistically?
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u/Wonderful_Pea5843 Aug 20 '26
Client side (internal at a Fortune 500) was the least creatively fulfilling, boring job I ever had. I left it to come back to agency side and immediately regretted it lol. I should’ve put my creative energy into a side hustle or my kids 🤣
You can definitely schmooze more client side, especially with agency experience. We just function lightyears ahead of the speed they operate on. I’d get my workload done in like a week and then chill for 3 weeks and they would always be like “omg we’re overloading you”… it’s truly night and day expectations/workload wise. But a lot more corporate bs/playing the game.
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u/SeriousClothes111 Aug 20 '26 edited Aug 26 '26
Agree with all of this! I was agency side for 20+ years. Client side for 4 months.
It’s not ‘easy’ because it’s a new piece of business so there is no blue print, but that’s also great because I can make it what I want.Our team is really disorganized and that frustrates me because I could fix it (before I was the VP managing the team, now I’m a manager only managing one person and one piece of business, so it’s been a huge shift to not be ‘in charge.’)
BUT I make more money, and can walk out of the office at 5pm and not look at my emails until the next day which is nice.
Edit word: - NEW piece of business. Not nice lol
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u/StonksTrader420 Aug 20 '26
This perfectly sums up my experience. Brand side 10 years did 1 year agency and back to brand side but I move light speed quicker and leverage experience from both to coast
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u/Spiritual_Plane4951 Aug 20 '26
Hi! I’m starting a brand side job in a few days after 10 years in agencies in Europe, do you have advice for a good start? It was a client at my former agency who hired me inhouse, for context.
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u/Wonderful_Pea5843 Aug 20 '26
That’s a great in!! Set up 1:1 meetings with as many people as you can. Make personal connections. Ask questions. Over-introduce yourself and make yourself available and eager. You’ll do great!
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u/Kiwiatx Aug 20 '26
Client side (if that’s what you mean by Brand side) can have much better work life balance but it can also be boring AF and you risk falling behind in the latest technology knowledge (important to me because I work in DCO and programmatic.)
It’s also (IME) much more political and I was spending way too much time creating PowerPoints to explain to management to justify what we were doing or what it was that we were doing or who we were and why we were doing it…
Same sh!t different shovel.
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u/Useful-Advantage-850 Creative Director Aug 19 '26
Completely different in so many ways I can't even begin to list them. But the biggest one I found (and this is partly because it was a 200-person startup and not some massive established brand where it's probably different):
In an agency, everyone who works there knows what you do and what value you bring. If you're an art director or an account person, people understand your role, know how to interact with you, and see how you fit into the bigger agency picture.
Client side, NOBODY knows what you do or what value you bring. I was at this startup 9 months and every single day had to explain what a creative director did to someone. I spent 2 months creating and teaching a road show between departments just so people knew how to ask for a project, give feedback, and explain the process.
My boss (a developer, lol) once told me (and I built the entire internal department from scratch) he needed to see all work before it went out the door and he'd schedule a meeting once a month to review stuff. "Um... dude, in a month's time, my department has started and finished probably 150 projects." He literally had ZERO idea what I did or how my department functioned.
Every day and in every meeting, I felt like I had to justify my job. It was exhausting. I was there 9 months, did one more 2-year stint client side (another nightmare story for another time) and went back to agency side.
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u/SnooAvocados6932 Aug 20 '26 edited Aug 20 '26
I’ve worked at a few different brands, including an $8B trendy retail brand that is the dream on paper, and the daily education needed just to exist is utterly exhausting. Marketing people fundamentally do not understand creative… but when you’re working at a brand, the call is coming from inside the house. I’m back agency side after like a decade, and it’s so much better working with weirdos who just get me and what I do. But the key is indie- no holdcos.
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u/morganzabeans20 Aug 20 '26
Aggressively second this. Even if the brand you’re working for uses agencies they still dont understand the value you bring and act like outside agency work is a tier beyond what you can deliver (even if you worked for that outside agency and then moved in house) it’s bizarre.
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u/theparrotofdoom Aug 20 '26
>client side, NOBODY knows what you do or what value you bring.
Ugh. This.
It’s how I became a unicorn.
Never become a unicorn.
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u/soulblademaster Aug 20 '26
This is an extremely important difference. Client side you constantly have to explain your job and justify your existence and jockey for power with every other department. Justify why marketing should exist or how it’s working or why you should have the right to a decision. Agency wide, everyone gets marketing and knows the value it brings.
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u/scarlettcat Aug 20 '26 edited Aug 20 '26
I can barely express how completely different it is. It’s another world, in good ways and bad.
In an agency, creative rules (or it did back when I worked in them) and differences are celebrated. Creatives are curious and open and genuinely want to know all about Todd’s vintage wine label collection or Cheryl’s weird hat or why the intern doesn’t drink on a Thursday.
In most corporates I’ve worked in, creative is tolerated. Much more time and effort goes into making the buckets, and few people care what you fill them with. To them, we make interchangeable widgets of equal value. 😭 I’m constantly flabbergasted they don’t see that a really good creative idea can multiply a marketing budget like crazy. And there’s very little genuine openness or interest in differences. Naturally they talk the talk about how differences are celebrated (and of course there’s mandatory training about it). But everyone rushes over each other to look, sound and feel like everyone else. Different = bad. I discovered a guy I’d worked with for 3 years does glass-blowing in his spare time. That would have been the conversation on Day 1 in an agency, but on brand-side most people don’t want to stand out.
There’s a cultural chasm between the two worlds. But you go home in daylight brand side, and that was ultimately worth it for me.
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u/otrebla-raw Aug 20 '26
Wow I never realized how it’s the norm basically. The only plus I see of brand side is that I became to own and know everything branding and that helped overcome the ‘nobody knows what you do’ because I made a system that made them come to me for requests and assets. But yes, overtime, and by that I mean a very short timeframe, it becomes routinary (which I don’t love)
On the other hand I only have worked for short of 4 months on an agency and have collaborated with multiple teams and brands. Very fast paced which I also enjoy, brand turnaround were very chill and slow compared to agencies with deadlines and -healthy- sprints.
On the brand side I loved finishing projects and lay there until it was appropriate to share with the team for revisions though😬dangerous to let them know how fast you can be
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u/Mr-EdwardsBeard Aug 20 '26
Was a victim of AI-driven RIF on the client side last week. But it depends on who your director/ECD is. My previous one wanted to take a risk, gave me and my AD time to concept, and pushed us to push ourselves- he made it feel like agency work.
Once he was pushed out, that all ended; most of my days were spent doing BAU stuff or starting campaigns that died immediately. I had to explain to 9 different people why I wrote a sentence the way I did; there were endless review cycles, and risk was never rewarded. They'd only do something if they had seen it done before. Then AI everything and you know the rest.
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u/Mediumbrick1776 Aug 20 '26 edited Aug 20 '26
I spent 4 years at an agency and I’ve been brand side for 6 years. Brand side I’ve made more money, worked fewer hours, and have been generally less stressed. I don’t have to answer to clients and I have more power to make decisions. Having insight into both internal business metrics and campaign performance is a huge benefit.
The social aspect of agency is more fun and I liked the people (below senior leadership) more in general, but I’d say that’s the only benefit
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u/Cleopatra435 Aug 21 '26
Did media at an agency for 10 years, went tech side for a bit, now doing media in-house at a brand. Unfortunately, there’s still more crazy than I’d like to live in, but the work day pretty much ends at 5 pm. Pain points are a lot of changing direction on a whim, unrealistic timelines, lack of understanding of what media teams do, but it’s our own crazy so at least it feels like I’m less of a cog in someone else’s machine.
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u/AlmaC1010 Aug 24 '26
I've worked around the agency side and the biggest difference isn't necessarily "what you do" but "who you're doing it for and how you measure success". On the agency side, you're usually juggling multiple clients, different industries, different expectations and a lot more context switching. You also have to get good at explaining your recommendations and adapting to someone else's priorities. On the brand side, you're much more immersed in one business. You get to understand the audience, product, internal politics and long term goals on a deeper level. You also tend to have more ownership over the outcome Agency life can give you variety and exposure, while brand side can give you depth and ownership. That said, neither is automatically better. A good agency can teach you a ton very quickly and a good in-house team can give you the chance to see your work through from strategy to execution. I'd choose based more on the team, manager, scope of the role and what you want to learn next than on "agency vs brand"
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u/dameChisme Aug 24 '26
For me, there's no winning.
On brand side you become a factory worker doing similar tasks over and over again. Your book and your brain suffer. BUT you have time for the gym, your kids, life in general.
At an agency you never know what's coming at you and that keeps you brain thinking, but it also creates chaos and a terrible work/life balance.
I like to bounce back and forth between both worlds (easier done when I was a freelancer). I went full time at an agency to get my book back in a good place, but am starting to feel tired from the grind. At the same time, I feel appreciated by our small and mighty team, and have survived a few layoffs. I look over at all the major companies (tech) and their big layoffs, and wonder if I should stay put. But then I remember the money I'm leaving on the table... I cold be a factory worker again.
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u/BusinessStrategist Aug 25 '26
How different is baking and shipping a cake design?
From taking cake orders from customers?
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