Etna Interactive
Sixty people, five functions, and one metric nobody puts on a dashboard.
Agency churn gets treated as a culture problem. It is a compensation and promotion-structure problem wearing a culture costume. I restructured the department around whether our subject matter experts stayed.
Where things stood
A 60-person department spanning paid, owned, earned, strategy and client services was structured in a way that made it hard for senior specialists to see a path forward without moving into people management, which is not where every strong specialist wants to go.
The call
The obvious move was another round of engagement surveys and culture programming. I passed on that. The retention problem was structural, not cultural, so I restructured the department and its promotion criteria around subject-matter-expert development, not just management track, and reconfigured the paid media fee structure to increase profitability while lowering perceived cost to clients. Inside marketing ops specifically, I moved the team from a pool of generalists floating between projects into specialist tracks. That was not mainly a retention play. It gave people a career path, kept institutional knowledge from evaporating between projects, and raised accountability: no one could point to being just "part of" a project and disclaim ownership of the result.
What got built
- Restructured the department around paid, owned, earned, strategy and client services
- Built a promotion track for subject-matter experts that did not require moving into management
- Created four director-level positions in functions that had previously topped out at manager, with three new tiers underneath them (managers, senior managers and senior specialists) so there was an actual ladder to climb
- Converted marketing ops from a pool of generalists into specialist teams, so expertise compounded instead of resetting on every new project
- Reconfigured the paid media fee structure to increase profitability while lowering perceived cost to clients
- Rebuilt leadership development programming for the department's managers
Scope
Chief Marketing Officer. Owned the restructure, compensation and promotion criteria, and leadership development.
Encouraged his leaders to think strategically, bring new ideas to the table, and take ownership of their areas of the business. I appreciated having a leader who trusted his team and gave us the opportunity to contribute and grow.
Marla Huskovy · Director of Paid Media, Etna Interactive
now: Director of Digital, Growth 99