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Agency vs. In-House
Curious to see what your experience has been like switching from working in social at an agency to working in-house. I think the agency, client-facing type of role is *actually* ruining my life but I’m really curious to see if it’s any better in-house. I’m sick of being a bitch to my clients 🙂
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1 Reply
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After 4 years of agency work and multiple burn-outs, I’m currently in the process of finally switching to client-side as well and curious of others’ experiences.
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In-house is better/faster. The pay is usually better too. And you only have to manage one brand. Reactive content happens faster and there are far fewer approvals. That’s just my experience though.
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I’ve only ever worked in-house, I would not do agency work at all.
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Been both. Ran digital for global brand. Now I’m head of strategy at an agency. They both have their perks. In house is definitely more chill. But I get to work on a lot of cool brands at my agency. So, it’s a toss up
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Agency here, 16 years now (not all but mostly in social). Yeah, burnout is real. But, I also get to touch a lot of diverse accounts, which keeps things interesting. So, okay for me I guess, but YMMV?
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After 7 years of working in agencies, I made the switch to client-side 8 months ago and I’m not planning on going back.
I finally have a good balance between work and private life + a doable workload. I’m grateful for everything I learned during my agency-years because it gives me the experience I need to do my current job.
Both have their pro’s and cons. You just have to analyze what gives you energy and what fits your life.
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Agencies suck, some people like them but most hate them in my experience. In house you know your products and brands better, your given more leeway, and in most organizations everything isn’t always an emergency as your doing things for yourself or your own company and not for someone else. You also don’t have to keep track of billable hours.
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I work in-house and quite like it except that most businesses don’t actually understand the value of social media or even marketing as a whole. It’s not a coincidence that CMOs have the highest turnover and are the least trusted by CEOs. That attitude does trickle down into the lower levels of the business as well.
You’ll go from working with a team of people who understand what you do and value you, who you can celebrate wins with, collaborate with and ask for advice, to working alone (you may have a team but it won’t be the same), getting lumped in with sales, and getting lots of terrible advice from Janet who’s son set up a Facebook account for her last week.
But the positives are that you can really get to know one brand, work in depth with it, and have longer term strategies. Plus you don’t have to fight to keep their business so it’s much more stable. And you have more autonomy and shorter approvals processes. Like I don’t have to get anything approved by anyone right now. I sometimes get someone to do a quick sense, spell, grammar, data check but that’s it
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I would say working at an agency will prepare you for an in-house role. Managing many projects/clients at the same time is a great skill that will transfer nicely.
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I appreciate the variety that comes with agency work, so I think I’d say it’s more interesting. But it can get fatiguing, so in-house has its appeals.
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As an employee you mean?
I’ve done both for a good period of time, and In house is better quality content creation for sure.
Agencies can pay better if you’re a beginner with low XP, but you’ll get run into the ground more often than not.
In house tends to pay less, but you only need to do one brand, so it’s a lot less of a workload. Granted, this is highly dependent on who you work for – I’ve worked for people who pay you generously to only post twice a month, while others barely pay you a buck or two over minimum to post on 5 different platforms everyday and grind out full video calendars and reports weekly.
Agencies can be good for starting out so that you can get a grasp on things and get good experience. You usually have a team as well, so there’s that.
In-house can be team based as well, but its pretty common to be the only one in charge of stuff and work by yourself too.
To be totally honest though – working for both is shit and should only be used as a stop point for you to either learn how to manage your own brand/agency, or use to pay the bills while you figure out your actual career path.
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6 years at agencies and 4 years brand-side. Would never go back. Better pay, better benefits, better work-life balance. Agency was fun when I was younger but don’t think I could do it anymore.
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9 years agency, now almost 2 years in-house. Completely switched industries, B2C to B2B. Biggest difference is the culture. You aren’t trying to “sell” your ideas as much, and I also am around people that I know will retire there. It sounds weird, but I’ve never known anyone to retire from an agency. The ones that have, were kinda forced out and went back to work as freelancers. Agency life did prepare me for in-house more than I would expect the other way around. I had to be sharp for my clients and be able to show my work at all times. In my experience so far, the same can’t be said in-house. It’s simply the way things are done and check the boxes we always check. Sets you up for success, especially in my role where I work around C-Suite weekly.
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I was agency side 3.5 years and have been client side for 5.5 years (FMCG and now tech) I RAN from agency side. Was sick of clients, so I became one lol.
Client side is far better as in my experience. They care about you as an employee and not a work monkey, pay is far better, you get far more insight into the brand and you’ll have way less out of office hour fires. Someone told me I would be bored client side, but I do the same style of role I did agency side and being able to work on multiple things at once has really helped in my favour vs those who were always client side
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