Don’t Come to the Buy Side without Sell Side Experience

Posted by Darren on Jun 24, 2011 • (Comments)

The title of the post is a bit of an exaggeration, but after reading below, you’ll see why.  Note, this mostly pertains to technology/digital opportunities.

I had a conversation with an industry colleague the other day and we both came from the sell side (publisher/content distributor) before we ended up on the buy side (agency/client).  We ended up chatting about agency talent and how beneficial it is to spend time on the sell side.

These are some points that we discussed:

  • If you are coming from an ad network, exchange, or other media technology capability, you generally have a better working knowledge of technologies and understand the constraints and opportunities they provide.  It’s also a lot easier to call “BS” on vendors when you’ve participated on their side of the fence.
  • Interfacing with many different types of buyers.  Similar to how the buy side gets to interface with many different sellers, by working on the sell side, you get to understand all of the needs of the marketplace and get privy to all of the questions being asked by different clients.  This is important as you can begin to understand which buy side agencies are stronger than others and what the industry wants in terms of execution.

I really think the first point above is the mega-important one.  As more and more technology penetrates advertising agencies, having a background that can discern the technologies and performance is going to become increasingly important.   I highly suggest that people round out their careers by being on both sides of the fence, then of course, pick the side they like best.

Tagged as , , , , , + Categorized as Advertising & Marketing
  • Hi,
    Sell-side analysts work for brokerage firms, and their recommendations result in more orders for the firms. Some argue that their role is simply to generate business for the firm that employs them. Buy-side analysts' recommendations are not available to anyone but the fund managers who employ them.
    sell side
  • I think your first point is super spot on (the rest is great too). Will serve everyone well to have some experience on the sell/ad tech side.
  • It's funny, I've always thought the opposite to be true.  Coming from the sell-side you have these weird notions of what advertisers are looking for versus coming from the advertiser side then moving to the publisher side.  Working on the agency/client side you get a much better sense of how to position your offerings so that they fit into a campaign ecosystem versus pretending the publisher you work for is the only pub on the plan.  You can then stop offering the publisher sponsored brand/roi studies or other ancillary offerings that don't really matter and focus more on how you can make the campaign a more successful one overall.
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