This account is so overstaffed. There are 4 account people doing the work of 1.5 people. This whole week, I’ve been spending about 2 hours per day actually doing work. The funny thing is that there is another person at the same level as me on the account and she stays until 7pm doing work. […]

Yesterday, I was talking to one of my online media friends who does paid search. She’s done only paid search and has never done banner media, so I asked her if she’s interested in branching into other areas of media that aren’t search-specific. Her response was something like, “I don’t think so. I want to […]

Ignoring people is an important skill to cultivate in this industry (and probably others as well). I certainly don’t ignore a lot of people; just people who make me dumber as a result of interacting with them.
There is one person who is in my group and is the same level as me, but since she’s […]

It’s terrible. It’s not nearly targeted enough. Ours is a highly specialized marketing product, which is relevant to probably only one in a thousand business people, yet we have some pretty mainstream news sites on there.
Unfortunately, this account has too many layers making it impossible for me to affect change. Also, I wasn’t hear when […]

The CEO of my mega-ad agency sends company-wide e-mails occasionally. I filter these all into a folder with other company-wide communications and I don’t read any of them. I don’t read them because they never say anything that piques my interest. If I want to spend time reading something that excites me, I’ll read one […]

…is that I can work on my own side-businesses and no one really cares. My boss doesn’t really care whether I’m maximizing the time I spend here. He just wants me to do the job that I’m given, and cover his own back.
At a small, more entrepreneurial shop, I would probably feel more obliged to […]

Small and independent shops have less layers, and a greater proportion of people who get directly impacted by the agency-client relationship. If an account gets lost, everyone from the CEO down gets impacted.
At large agencies, like the one I work at, who’s affected if an account is lost? The people servicing the account don’t lose […]

I wanted to have a windows plugin called IME installed on my machine so that I could see Japanese characters. I figure that I read blogs and news during the day, I get my work done, so why shouldn’t I be able to read in Japanese. Keep in mind that this is a functionality that […]

Here’s a tidbit that’ll get a few chuckles…
Spoke to a friend of mine who went down to the iMedia Agency Summit in Amelia Island, Florida this past month. He claims that it’s one big party. His proof? He says that he was there for 4 nights and got laid with a different girl each night.

There seems to be this ‘cover your back’ mentality in this industry, where people will CC you on e-mails even if you’re barely involved just so that they can “keep you in the loop” or if some issue comes up later, you can be partially blamed because you were “CCed on the e-mails”.
I hate this. […]