Skill building within a young department

Driggs told ADWEEK that getting new employees up to speed on how to plan and buy media requires a heavy lift and a willingness to let early-career employees shadow more experienced staff.

“It’s similar [to] some of the other departments, but because in media we’re dealing with our clients’ dollars and our clients’ reporting, which ultimately can affect the return on investment or return on ad spend, we have to make sure that we’re being diligent in the training and the oversight with everything that a new hire is doing,” said Driggs. 

Assembling the right team requires hiring experts in subject areas that used to be unrelated, given that media practice employees might handle anything from billing to data privacy and compliance to vendor management. 

“[Becoming] interdependent upon all those factors to make the team work cohesively is really what needs to be thought of [when building a media department from scratch],” said Thomas. “It feels like media is a little bit of a unicorn.”

Building trust with the market

Rolling out a media practice is not only a significant investment but takes time to generate ROI, agency leaders agreed.

Over a six-month time frame, Gale hired six employees to take on different areas of expertise like search, programmatic and strategy. Simms then invited those employees to join “integrated huddles”—group conversations about how practice areas across the Gale ecosystem can deliver on a client’s brief. 

Simply including media staff in those conversations allowed the agency to organically sell its media services. This went on for a year before Gale felt comfortable advertising its media services to search consultants.

“One of the things I take away from adding a lot of capabilities is they always take longer to germinate than you expect,” Simms said.

Tetrick began circulating his media practice capabilities to search consultants early on but suggests new media practice leaders prioritize gathering case studies and success stories to broaden marketing activities. 

“You need to build up a track record and build up some trust in the market,” Tetrick said. “You’ve got to prove to a lot of people [that] you’re able to steward and manage … be beholden to … their millions of dollars they are entrusting you with,” Tetrick said.