How is Advertising as a career?
A friend-of-a-friend was telling me about his buddy who is a director at an advertising agency. His hours are only around 11am-8pm, makes 380k/year, and his firm gives him prizes for meeting certain weekly account selling goals.
Is there any truth to this / how typical is this? What's the "path" to getting into advertising?
I think you start out as an account coordinator and move up from there. Those jobs probably come from networking or college recruiting. For the first couple years, you'll get paid like crap but you eventually get tons of perks. Btw, that guy can come in at 11 because he's probably entertaining clients all the time.
All I know is you get to drink rye all day, smoke in your office, bang your secretary, bang your clients, bang your nanny, and go home and bang your wife. Oh and you go to dinners at the Palm and other fancy steakhouses where you continue to drink rye and smoke.
Seems like a good life.
God damn it NE, I was going to do a Mad Men thing.
Sounds like his job is actually sales and not "advertising".
Real advertising (i.e. not sales) is an insanely competitive and narrow field. My old roommate works at a big name ad agency in NYC. My understanding is that even coming out of the best portfolio schools in the country, you're going to start off at like $25k - $30k per year, and there aren't even a large number of those slots available. I understand the comp curve accelerates rapidly, but only for a TINY number of people - like more restricted than any of the career paths that are discussed around here (IB, Consulting, etc). But for those that do make it up, $500k+ is not uncommon. More typical, is that entry level folks put in a few years making shit money, and exit to corporate marketing gigs.
STAY AWAY!
STAY AWAY!
You will probably make just as much, if not more money working as a recruiter for a staffing comapny. In order to be in a great position in advertising you'd have to be working for a popular internet company similar to Monster.com. Otherwise it's just another sales job.
Noboby who worked in an agency would have weekly selling goals ...
Money is crap starting out (and never approaches consulting, much less finance, at similar tenure levels). I worked at a big-name agency before going into consulting and made $32k.
That being said, competent guys can move up the ranks very fast - it's dominated by women, but agencies want guys in leadership roles.
This all depends on what you mean by "advertising". If you work the "creative side", you get paid like crap ($35,000 out of college, $42,000 from great programs) and are ensentially kicked out by the time you are 30 unless you show amazing leadership and move up quickly. This is the point where you get into sales numbers, but again there are such a minute number of these spots that it is not a common job title. If you are talking about the "research and media" side, you can make more in the long run as you are proving to clients how and why your advertisements work. These jobs are more stable and that is why it is thought that you can make more on average(you will have a career that lasts).They study blood pressure, eyes, sweat, and even track spending responses to the public for every type of ad you can imagine. This is usually a private research firm so I'm assuming this is not at all what you are talking about in regards to advertising sales. Unless you run your own ad shop or can somehow last long enough to become a partner, this is a rough and unstable industry to have a job in. Most people will make the treck over to marketing for a f500- f1000 firm...
This is all coming from my blood relative who is pursuing her phd in advertising/communication, i.e. I have no first hand experience, but this is the jist that I have gotten from her.
Hope this helps.
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