Careers in Advertising and Marketing Communications - Part 1

By Eswara VAN Sharma

LinkedIn Profile

If you’ve been following this blog or your professors closely (as you should have been!) your classroom learning would have been supplemented by perspectives on a career in marketing, about consumers, customers, media, a career in FMCG sales and what happens in market research.

So you would have learnt about how the marketing folks analyse data and information, look at their consumers, figure out a need or gap in the market and maybe choose to launch a product or take some action to improve their share. You would have then read about how they may engage a research agency to either validate their hypotheses or explore new areas or simply to analyse sales data and market shares.

All these are absolutely critical parts of the whole marketing puzzle. And it is a puzzle with our diverse country, ever-changing consumer preferences and trends, and emerging media. Now there is also one more part of the puzzle where you, dear B-school student, can play a part. How does the information about the product or brand get to the target consumer? Through media? Yes, but what goes into the medium that is chosen? An advertisement. And who creates the ad? An advertising agency. This is where a large part of the creativity in the marketing process resides.

Advertising has many definitions and doubtless Google will happily provide you with many of these. The one that resonates is what a gentleman named John E Kennedy called it in 1904. Advertising, he said, is salesmanship in print. We will come back to why this particular definition is important later in this article.

Let us look at the main career areas you will come across in this field:

• Marketing Communications or Integrated Marketing Communications
• Account Management and Strategic Planning
• Media

Marketing Communications or Integrated Marketing Communications
If you go through some of the posts on this blog, you will see that a marketing manager’s job is not all creative and glamorous. You would have read that 90% of his or her time is spent on a whole lot of other things that have little to directly do with marketing. In fact, as a marketer I barely spent 5% of my time with my ad agency!

Analogous to the emergence of the strategic planner in an ad agency (though not during the same time frame), over time companies realized that their marketing communications, being a specialized area, needed an attention, focus and understanding that was far in excess of what their marketing managers could devote. To this was added the necessity to manage media budgets, the creative and media agencies and the company’s own assets (such as its website, social media, and so on). Thus evolved the role of the MarCom Manager.

The MarCom Manager handles all these aspects of the company’s communication. Usually, MarCom is a separate team reporting to the marketing head of the company. MarCom could also encompass PR and Events. MarCom people are the interface between the company’s marketing and sales people on one hand, and the creative and media agencies on the other. Again, the MarCom manager distils the collective needs of the company and the brand into what to say.

Usually, they have some ad agency or media agency experience (and sometimes, the client company may ‘poach’ their agency account person to join them!) and are well-versed in agency processes, as well as having an appreciation of good creative and an understanding of consumers.

Often, the MarCom manager will have to manage multiple agencies as many companies choose to have different agencies working on different brands. In addition, the company may have engaged a PR agency, an Event agency and a Social Media agency to work along with the creative agency to deliver a multi-faceted campaign. He or she will also need to deal with multiple stakeholders internally and externally – some of whom have more authority than him or her, but less expertise (!) – and still be responsible for producing relevant, timely communication campaigns.

To be continued . .

For Careers in Advertising and Marketing Communications - Part 2 Click Here>>
For Careers in Advertising and Marketing Communications - Part 3 Click Here>>