The brands I’ve worked with
My journey to becoming a marketer is non-traditional. It includes stops in startups, academia, and agencies across three countries. From starting as a digital marketer to becoming the brand and communications consultant I am today, each step of my career has taught me valuable lessons about what the role of marketing should be.
A Call to Marketing Strategy
Getting my first professional job in Tech Consulting was great for learning how to analyze businesses and data but the deliverables always felt too rigid. My active mind looked at the numbers and machines and asked:
“Who are the people behind these things?”
“What are their motivations, wants, hopes, and dreams?”
If I were going to conduct quantitative analysis and implement technology, I wanted it to help explain why humans acted in ways that were sometimes rational and sometimes seemingly irrational. I wanted to feed my curiosity about people and go down rabbit holes of research to come up with hypotheses and insights on the subjects, values, and ideals that are important to people. Ultimately, I wanted the end product of my work to be something that would help people and organizations express themselves effectively and authentically.
I knew I wanted to be a marketer when I realized that I could get paid to learn about human behaviour and help people and organizations define their expression. I just had to figure out how to actually become a marketer.
At First, Advertising Strategy Was Just A Dream
When deciding to pursue a career in marketing, my initial thought was that I would enter advertising. Naively believing that the work would be just like Mad Men, I explored how to get a job in an advertising agency. However, I was confronted with challenges in every direction I looked. I had no idea what a brief was, what a proper communication plan looked like, or what PPC stood for. Unlike many people in the industry, I didn’t go to “Ad-School” or have any formal training outside of a few marketing classes I took in my undergrad. I didn’t know what the difference between a creative agency and a media agency was. Only a handful of people I knew entered the industry and, coming from a small city in Canada, even the ones that did only worked at small independent agencies. The Ogilviys and TBWAs of the world were nothing more than agencies I had read about in magazines and no one in my network worked at global advertising groups. Pretty soon, it became clear that entering the advertising industry was not a realistic path, so I had to find another way into the world of marketing.
From Tech Consulting to Digital Marketing for Tech Startups
Coming from the tech consulting world, I found that the easiest path to enter marketing would be to leverage my knowledge of data and analytics to bridge my way into marketing. After much research, I realized that digital marketing was the way forward. I enrolled myself in a digital marketing boot camp and learned how to run a basic ad campaign, build a WordPress-site, manage web analytics, create a simple social and content plan, and combine it all together to help acquire and keep customers.
The digital marketing foundation I gained allowed me to start freelancing. Running my own business was exciting and working with various clients early gave me a good idea of where I could add value. The scopes were small and many times I was only creating basic websites, running small-budget Facebook and Google campaigns, and setting up analytics to track conversions, but it was a good way of seeing how marketing could make a tangible impact on businesses.
Eventually, I started managing small digital marketing teams for tech startups and got the opportunity to sink my teeth into all aspects of Digital Marketing. Suddenly my budget grew from 4-digits to 6-digits and I was doing everything from media buying to copywriting, analytics, social media management, and running quarterly omnichannel marketing campaigns. Working in a startup, marketing didn’t just mean ensuring brand alignment or maximizing acquisition, but it also meant constantly worrying about things like liquidity and churn. In most of these roles, I worked directly with the CEO and CFO to make sure that the digital marketing initiatives aligned with the business and financial goals of the company.
Learning Strategy Abroad
After a few years of working in tech startups, I was ready for something new. Not just something new but somewhere new. Having spent over a quarter of a century in Canada, the itch I had to go explore the world had grown too big. Working in startups was exhilarating and fun but I also knew I wanted to try working with bigger brands and organizations to see what a well-oiled marketing machine looked like. To do this, I decided to go back to school. Paris was the destination.
Completing an MBA at HEC Paris opened my eyes to perspectives and possibilities that I had never even considered. Living and studying with people from 50 different countries and dozens of industries challenged what I knew about life and what I knew about marketing. In my class were people from some of the world’s largest companies, big consulting, investment banks, and advertising giants. I saw how they approached problem solving and it was a far cry from the scrappy startup mentality I had. Not necessarily better but just a vastly different and more polished way to approach things. After graduation, I knew that this was something I wanted to do more of.
Of course, things don’t always go as planned. I graduated in December 2019 and explored finally making that career switch into an advertising agency. I had learned enough and made enough connections to the industry during my time in school that I felt like I could build a career there. We all know what happened next. COVID-19 started and hiring froze across the board. I knew that making a career switch at this point would be incredibly difficult so I took another digital marketing job, this time in Paris. I would had to wait to make the switch to advertising. Eventually, it came.
Creative Strategy for Enterprise Brands in Agencyland
After a year of working in Paris, a close former classmate called me and said she knew someone at a creative advertising agency who was hiring for a Strategy role. She thought that I would be a great fit for it and asked if I wanted a referral. I immediately knew this was the opportunity that I was waiting for. After five rounds of interviews, I officially landed that agency job I first dreamed of when I became a marketer all those years prior.
They say that no one stays in Advertising past 40 and here I was, pushing 30, and getting my first agency job. I didn’t know exactly what being a Strategist at an advertising agency entailed but I knew enough about marketing that I felt confident that I could make an impact. I learned quickly that I had to use my non-traditional marketing background to fill in the gaps in knowledge and help me get ahead. Some of the processes at the agency felt immediately familiar. For example, the frameworks we used looked a lot like the ones I used in my MBA. However, other processes felt very foreign. I was baffled when I saw how many rounds of approvals it took, from internal check-ins with every team to go up the client ladder and legal, for anything to go to market. Coming from a startup world where I was used to managing the whole campaign process, from ideation to design and publishing, I noticed how a disconnect between strategy and implementation could lead to many inefficiencies. Between putting together in-depth brand architectures and communication brands for clients, I knew that my calling card at an agency would be to help break down some of these silos and provide value beyond just strategy.
The actual work as a strategist was thrilling. Helping clients launch brands and build sophisticated messaging structures meant I used the strategic skills I developed in school and was constantly thinking about brand expression. The daily research I did gave me a reason to find insights about human behaviour and use them in the deliverables I was creating. The work of a creative strategist felt like what I thought I would be doing when I first wanted to become a marketer. It wasn’t Mad Men but it was it was better in so many ways.
The agency I worked for wasn’t the biggest, but it was a part of Omnicom, one of the world’s advertising giants. This meant that many of the projects I worked on was in collaboration with bigger more well-known agencies like BBDO and Interbrand. I also got involved with cross-agency organizations within Omnicom, leading to me becoming one of the Global leads of the Asian Leaders Circle Employee Resource Group. These opportunities provided me a great platform to form deep relationships with people in different agencies worldwide. These interactions helped me get a full scope of what it meant to work at an advertising agency. Lastly, at the agency, I was also only working on projects with clients from Fortune 500 companies, meaning that I got to see how some of the world’s largest brands were built and how they show up in the market. It was a far cry from the start-ups I worked with at the beginning of my career. Over my time at the agency, I had an opportunity to work with and learn from some of the best strategists and creatives in the industry and it helped me define my own approach to strategy.
Building Strategies for Emerging Brands
Over the last 10+ years, I’ve helped organizations from sole proprietors to Fortune 500 with everything from building their brands to running their campaigns. Spending time working in startups and agencies, along with completing an MBA from a top global program, gave me a very diverse view of the role of marketing and how organizations could make it more effective.
I still work with agencies today as a freelance strategist, collaborating with high-performing teams to deliver in-depth strategies for clients. Along with this, I also work with emerging brands as a brand and communications consultant, creating and implementing marketing strategies that balance creative excellence with actionable deliverables. Over my last few years working agency-side, I kept on thinking about how the startups and scale-ups I worked with in the past could use the strategies that I had been implementing for enterprise brands. It would require a lot of streamlining and focus on immediate impact, but I was certain that it would be valuable. Doing this work has allowed me to use all the things I’ve learned about marketing over my career to do the most impactful work.
You can read my unique strategic approach to marketing here.