Well I'll start by saying I'm a bit biased. I've worked for a media agency where it had some of the world retail behemoths accounts. I was a digital media strat

Well I'll start by saying I'm a bit biased. I've worked for a media agency where it had some of the world retail behemoths accounts. I was a digital media strategist on a specific market - though some of the stuff we did was indeed by global guidelines, so we had visibility on what was being done at a global level, still my bias is towards the reality of the market I was in. I've dealt with their management and executives (brand managers, marketing managers, etc) and even by their criteria of HR choices, and it's pretty clear what kind of people they want: they want smart, orderly people who can execute well. Some they get them from specific business universities early - people above average - and enroll them on some internal college for some time. They are not very creative and innovative, even if they were they will dry out because they don't have margin for it - and maybe that's part of their success: they need to have a multinational oiled machine that outputs results. Even the product launches came either by market alignment, or simply from an internal catalog. Most of their insights came from internal dashboards fueled by Nielsen, GFK, Kantar (amazing sources by the way), and many private studies. The thing is, they got to where they are because they had the Mass Media(Communication) and Distribution upper hand for years. TV, the king for many years, was the most effective way to get to the masses but it was extremely expensive - yet they had the financial muscle so they just had to pump GRPs. Same goes for Retail Distribution, they built good distribution channels/partnerships - people wanted their products, they had emotional relationships with their brands. But times change... first it started with retailers creating their own brands (distribution brands) because they built the financial muscle to advertise them, and had the distribution channels, they just had cut down margins to win in price and win the volume game... Now it's the internet - people who know what their doing can reach a specific audience, deliver great messages, build amazing brands, and have great distribution channels - such as Amazon. It's a loud market, and they mumble terms, jargon's and keywords they don't fully understand. They have historial brands, with amazing value, yet they are not connecting with people like some of these brands are doing. Maybe they are so big they don't even notice it in their market shares, but some of these numbers aren't even known in their holy reports... and it chips off, day by day. They are also too proud to assume their are not doing a good job - they rather blame agencies and create pitches instead of taking accountability. I've quit the agency job because my goal was to learn from with their mistakes and successes - and I believe it's quite doable to out-pace them, since they are extremely slow. I'm working on that right now. In my opinion they need to employ entrepreneur minded people and give them the opportunity to fail. It's a weird-amazing time to be alive as a marketer :)