Investing in the Next Generation of Marketing Talent
Marketing agencies talk a lot about growth. Client growth, campaign growth, business growth.
We think there’s a growth story that gets talked about far less: the pipeline of talent coming into our own industry, and whether agencies like ours are actually doing anything to build it.
We’ve made this a consistent focus over the years, not a one-off gesture.
In the last four weeks alone, seven students have spent time with our team. Ranging from Year 11 students taking their first look at a working office, through to sixth formers weighing up career options, to a university student gaining hands-on agency experience ahead of the graduate job market. That range matters to us. Talent development isn’t a single event; it’s a pipeline, and we think agencies have a role to play at every stage of it.
Durham University
Why We Don’t Do “Watch and Learn”
Too many work experience placements amount to a week of sitting quietly at the back of a room. We’ve deliberately built ours differently. Students who come through our doors get involved in real, live work.
- Competitor analysis
- Sitting in on Google and Meta ad account setup
- Drafting LinkedIn content
- Watching how we build and optimise LinkedIn ad campaigns
- Helping pull together a PR media list
- Researching podcast opportunities for client outreach
If someone is giving up their time to be with us, we think the least we owe them is a week where they actually do something, rather than just observe it.
A Generation That Understands Marketing Better Than They’re Given Credit For
One thing that consistently strikes us: however early-stage a student is in their thinking about a career, they rarely arrive with a blank slate. When we run through the foundational owned, paid, earned and shared media model that underpins how we explain marketing to clients, it’s rare for it to land as new information. Most students grasp it almost instinctively. Not because they’ve studied it, but because they’ve lived inside it every day as consumers, long before they ever sat at our desks.
That’s a useful reminder for the industry as a whole. The next generation of marketers isn’t starting from zero. They’re starting from lived experience, and our job is to give that experience some structure and a route into the profession.
Why This Sits at the Core of How We Operate
For a small agency, giving up staff time to brief, supervise and properly involve a student is a genuine cost, every hour spent on it is an hour not billed to a client. We do it anyway, on a recurring basis, because we believe agencies in our sector have a responsibility to open the door for young people who might otherwise never get an insight into what a working agency actually looks like from the inside.
This isn’t a campaign or an initiative with a start and end date. It’s a working habit, built into how the agency operates, and one we intend to keep building on.
