Analytics from Ad Agency to Early Stage Startup
When I was searching for a job in senior year of my liberal arts college, most people told me I could either go to a PhD program or go into finance. None of those options appealed to me and by some miracle, I ended up working at a 10 people ad agency in NYC. I have been a connoisseur of well-done ads as far as I can remember. Going into an ad agency for analytics might not have been the first thought in my mind but it made sense to me given my interests and I loved it!
After 6 years on the agency side and working with multiple clients from various industries, I felt I needed some new kind of challenge. I decided to move into startups, something that I have always thought about in the back of my mind while working in the agency world. Landing a role at a startup was not easy as recruiters did not understand what I could bring to the table given my background of working in analytics within ad agencies. Now that I have spent some time at a startup, looking back, working in a small ad agency where you primarily work closely with multiple small to mid-size businesses at a time was the perfect training ground to be at a startup. You have a good idea of what others do and you also have a good sense of what not to do. Here is a list of 5 things I have learned while working at an ad agency that can be incredibly valuable if you end up working at an early-stage startup
Learn About the Business
Before starting to work with any new clients, I would go through every strategy and business document I could get my hands on. If they were not available, I would reach out to others who might have access to it. I realized early on, that to be effective at my job and deliver what they need, I should learn as much as I can about the business. Applying the same idea to a startup might look slightly different. Instead of reaching out to the account managers, you might have to reach out to different teams. An early-stage startup might not have those documents ready so you might have to set up 1–1 with people or ask if you can be in different meetings to just listen and learn.
Deliver Things that are Valuable to the Business
Don’t remember the number of times I found a shiny new thing that looked really fun to build but realized later it might not deliver much value to the business given their current obstacles. Learning more about the business makes it easy to understand things that are valuable to them. Startups move fast and they don’t have a lot of time so you must spend your time and energy on things that would bring the most value to the business.
Data Documentation can go a Long Way
Throughout my career, I have built multiple dashboards for a wide variety of businesses. It was the perfect place to test and learn how different people approach to looking at the data. After a dashboard is shared, I would often get the same type of questions over and over again about the data. Through my journey of trial and error, I have realized that including data definitions and notes about the data within the dashboards itself decreases a lot of those back and forth, it also empowers them to confidently look at the data and be more engaged. The same idea applies while working at startups. It becomes even more important at an early-stage startup where you might be the first person defining a lot of these metrics.
Understand how Comfortable they are with Data
Working with so many businesses, I got to interact with people who have a very different understanding of how digital marketing data works. Some people might be completely new to it, while others might already have a very good understanding of it. In order to have others understand the value of what you are bringing to the table as an analytics person, it is important that they understand what the data means and know how to use the data to make business decisions. If you can understand where they stand in their data knowledge, you can then take the steps to get them to a place where they feel more engaged and can even be a great person to collaborate with. Data people collaborating closely with business stakeholders often results in great data questions.
Be Scrappy and Find Ways to Make Things Faster
In my first job out of college, I was asked to automate their reporting process and they had a very limited budget for it. So I went out, researched, and found the best process/tool that was out there given the budget. Since launching the tool to automate everything, the difference was night and day. Instead of spending time pulling the data, I could spend more time looking into the data to extract insights and strategy on what we should do next. In the agency world, as you are working with multiple clients at a time, with multiple overlapping deadlines, you are forced to think about how to make your internal processes faster and more efficient. The same way of thinking can be very valuable when working at a startup as there might be multiple things that need to get done and stakeholders are expecting you to get them done as soon as possible.
Changing industries can be scary and difficult at times. Hope this post can help someone who is also thinking of taking the next big step in their career.
