Amy Grant's Journey to Senior Strategist

Amy Grant is a Senior Strategist at M&C Saatchi Sydney. Seven years into her career, Amy made the switch from Account Service to Strategy. In this article, she shares how she started out in the industry, what made her decide to make a career change, and how she went about it.

How and why I got into Advertising is kind of a long story. I was studying arts/law at uni in Canberra. I had finished all the arts components of my degree, so I was just doing straight law and was absolutely miserable. There was nothing creative about it and it was really boring.

So I decided to step back and take some time off from studying. I graduated with my arts degree and thought “I probably need to get a job, you know, the retail uni part-time jobs are probably not going to cut it”. Obviously!

At the time, the only grad programs that were still open were in advertising. I’d never been into an agency before, but I’d always had an interest in communications, so I just threw an application to the wind. I was lucky enough to get into the comms council graduate program. 

Sometimes I say I talked my way into the industry. As part of the hiring process, I did a five minute presentation to about 40 people about why they should hire me. It wasn't about what or who you knew, but it was about how you thought.  And I got in that way.

When I started in that program, I knew nothing about advertising. I had never stopped to consider how an ad gets put together, or what happens along the way.

I did the grad program for 12 months and then went back to uni and finished my law degree. But I knew I didn't want to be a lawyer, I wanted to be in advertising.

I landed my first role in advertising as a graduate Account Executive. About three or four weeks in I remember learning about strategy and the role that it played. That was the point when I thought "oh, that’s the thing I've been looking for that I didn't know existed". 

But strategy is typically a small team without as much retainer coverage as other parts of the business. And there aren't that many entry-level roles in strategy either. So it can be quite hard to break into, especially when you're starting out. For a long time, I didn't know how to do it. I kept going in account service and was climbing the ladder, but it got to a point where I would be taking a backwards step to move into strategy. I had a few years experience under my belt, but I was applying for entry-level strategy roles, and then wouldn't be considered because I was sort of overqualified.

So I took a marketing role in one of my clients’ teams, to get a bit more generalised marketing experience and hopefully make a sideways step easier. 

When I was ready to come back agency-side, I met with a few recruiters who agreed that being hired into a strategy role was going to be a tough ask, for all the reasons I already knew. I would need to convince someone that I could do the job, even though I hadn't had the title. And I think titles can be useful, but it's not everything that I can do or everything that I have.

They suggested that I find an Account Director job, but be quite strategic about it. I needed to look for two things. First, an agency that's big enough that I could spend a lot of time with the strategy team. And second, an account that was strategic in nature. The aim became to transfer internally within an agency because it was pretty clear that I wasn't going to get a job as a strategist out on the open market.

So I freelanced while I looked for the right role. I knew that I was looking for an account that was in a growth phase or in a phase of change where they would need a lot of strategic guidance. Then the Account Director role on BIG W at M&C popped up, so I went for it.

I was in that role for about six months before I did anything about it. I'd worked quite closely with the Strategy team on the BIG W brand work, and felt ready to start that conversation. I went to the Senior Strat Director and told her I was interested in strategy. She was really receptive to it and together we figured out how to make it happen.

Finding the right people to mentor me and prepare me for the move was really important. And that was luck. I couldn't have planned for that.

Not long after that, we were doing Personal Development Plans and my Group Head asked what I wanted to do next. I just said,” I appreciate all the opportunities that I've been given in account service, but actually I really want to shift into strategy”. But we were in the middle of developing the BIG W brand platform, so agreed we needed to get that off the ground before going any further.

I kept performing at the highest possible level that I could in both aspects of the work. I didn't see why the agency  would support me in moving if I didn't keep delivering on the job they hired me to do. And It was so important to me personally that I didn't drop the ball on my account service role. I wanted to show that it wasn't just about me and what I wanted, but that I was invested in the business and the agency as well.

I ended up doing an official hybrid role for a couple of months and then one day in late 2019 our head of strategy took me for a coffee. She handed me a letter and she said, "you're formally joining my team from January". 

Honestly, it was one of the best days of my professional life.

I'd been in advertising for eight years by then, trying to work towards it. There were lots of false starts. And it took a couple of years of figuring out how to do it, before I could actually start doing it. 

But in the end, it took being honest. Looking back, I was quite scared. I thought people would think I was squandering the opportunity that I had. That they wouldn't help make it happen for me because they were paying me for this job, not that job. But people generally aren't that cold. People want their colleagues and employees to succeed.

I know other people who’ve had much smoother and easier paths into strategy. But at the same time, there is a lot of stuff that people with the same title as me don't have experience with, or don't know. And a lot of my experience as a senior suit has been really valuable in progressing quickly. And I am progressing quickly, in October last year I was promoted to Senior Strategist.

The moral of the story is: You shouldn't be afraid to voice what you want from your career, even if it's different to the job you're doing at the moment.