Marketing Shouldn’t Be a Dirty Word in Silicon Valley

>"Yet trying to recruit from agencies remains disappointingly difficult given the caliber of talent and training overall."

Source?

I'm an ex-agency guy on my second client-side stint. Having spent a significant portion of my career agency-side, I can say that agencies tend to be low-margin, serviced-based businesses, and that tends to suck for their employees. This is because the easiest lever to pull to improve the bottom line is assigning more work to the same number of people (or fewer).

I learned a massive amount in the agency environment due to my bird's eye view of the industry and best practices across numerous best in class clients. But I can confidently say that being client-side is almost always a better work/life balance, and typically better pay as well. Doubly so if you are at a high-margin, product-based company.

As such, the sales pitch to recruit agency talent is typically quite easy if you are actually offering a competitive salary and have healthy work/life balance at your company. Hell, simply mentioning "competitive salary" and "healthy work/life balance" in the same sentence may be enough to get them salivating.

But overall, I would agree that marketing as a profession tends to get a bad rap out here. There are good marketers and bad, just as in any profession. Unfortunately, given that the barrier to entry into the field is significantly lower than some other professions, it is not uncommon for folks to have encountered really bad marketers.

In my mind, a solid modern-day marketer needs to:

- Be able to model things in Excel in their sleep

- Have strong working knowledge (if not deep technical knowledge) of how data flows between various platforms, the strengths, weaknesses, and limitations of said data, and when to trust your instincts over the data

- Have some technical knowledge or at the very least be able to have an intelligent conversation with the engineers and PMs who are typically responsible for implementing what marketing is asking for

Those are a starting point in my mind. Some might argue there are strong marketers out there who lack these skills. I would argue they may be strong in some areas, but their skills are not current or fully fleshed out.