I was trained as a Geographer in college.  And although considered by many to be a bit of a “non-subject” (unless you want to teach) there is one core concept that Geographers lead the world on and has helped me out throughout my working life.

A multi-disciplinary approach to problem solving.

This means that instead of assuming there is one solution to a problem, geographers are encouraged to get input from every affected party, specialism and context in order to find a better, holistic solution.

In marketing, this is probably called ‘integrated’.  But there is more to this approach than just having many facets to a campaign.

What about the team executing the work?

There are many more people working in the creative services industry today who have experience of both client side and agency side business.  This is really important if you want to take a multi-disciplinary approach.
Take the article in Marketing last week where they list out all the client-side issues that do not concern an agency: planning, risk management, retail, commercial team negotiations.

Good point.

And in conversation with William Corke at Harvest Digital,

“We’re recruiting Ads and a CSD at the moment, and nearly all the candidates have both client and agency experience.”

He goes on to say why he thinks this is happening

“[the] Skills market is more agile (whatever that means, but I think it sounds about right!).  Another example of the blurring of boundaries – a lot of what agencies do is in-house at clients now, from creative (Google’s campaign that launch this week in the UK) to paid search (loads of big clients do this in-house).”

And so if you need another job – take a stab at going to the other side of the fence.  It’ll probably make your experience  more rounded and it might set you up for improved multi-disciplinary skilled approach to solving complex marketing problems.

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