Explore Callum Bee-MacGregor's journey in the Advertising Agency Industry

Yeah, for sure. So, I’m actually a bit of a nomad. I grew up in Germany to Scottish parents. I’ve only ever lived in Scotland for around three months. My name is very Scottish. Callum McGregor is probably as Scottish as you could get. Growing up with a military background meant that I was moving around a lot, so I’m kind of rootless as part of my DNA. I’m now living in Manchester which is a very diverse city. I moved here because I liked the opportunity of meeting other people that were rootless as well. So, I’m rootless by default in a way. – Callum Bee-MacGregor

As I said, I was living in Germany throughout all of my education, moving to different kinds of international schools. I really wanted to come into the UK and get a degree. So, I chose to study at the University of Lincoln and I decided to go down a route of English literature and Film & Television. It’s very different to what I do now, but I’ve always been very passionate about sports. When I graduated, I managed to intern at a local sports data company called Winners. They were helping clients like UEFA and some of the member nations of Europe with their sports’ CRM. It was a mix of a bit of CRM and data kind of element aligned with the sport element as well. So, I applied, got myself an internship and that internship led to an exec position. The exec position led to a managerial position and I had five great years working there. After that, I thought I needed a new challenge, and I needed to try something new. An opportunity came up at Ear to the Ground which is based in Manchester and by that point I’d actually moved there. The two elements aligned together and now I manage a Fan Intelligence offering. – Callum Bee-MacGregor

It’s mad when you think about how life works, right? Things happen that you either can or can’t control. You might have a five-year, ten-year plan in mind, your parents might have a plan for you. All I can say to you is that you have to just go with the flow. You have to just put yourself out there, try new things. When that starts to take hold, then you need to really step into it and dive head first into it because if you don’t, you might lose out on opportunity. You might go down a path that you didn’t predict but it can end up being much better than the path you had planned. Life isn’t perfect despite how much we’d like it to be, so we have to be quite flexible with everything we do. That in itself is fun. Exploring new routes that you maybe hadn’t thought about might actually be better for you than just following the plan that you wrote down when you were younger. That would be my advice. You just got to lean into everything that life throws at you, the good and the bad. Otherwise, you might just lose your path anyway. – Callum Bee-MacGregor

Sure. So, Ear to the Ground is a marketing agency. We specialize in activation and market research. Fan Intelligence itself is what we pride ourselves in being our USP. It’s a network of over 11,000 of the most cultural influential fans in the world. It’s how we take our clients’ heads out of the boardroom and into the hearts and minds of cultural fan bases across the globe. So, we’re not trying to say that we know all the answers, because I don’t feel like any marketing agency will ever know all the answers. What we can do and say is that we can get those answers by putting ourselves in front of people that are living and breathing whichever sports or gaming element that a particular client wants to get involved in. We can then do what we class as leading culture through the power of listening. So, we speak to football fans on the ground in America to figure out what are the challenges that they face, what they would like to see from brands, from clients, from anything that’s happened in that landscape. By putting ourselves in front of those people, we get to learn about what means the most to them. Then we can then take all that knowledge back to our agency, share it amongst the clients that we work with and come up with what we think are pretty groundbreaking campaigns that we do end up creating. – Callum Bee-MacGregor

Sure, so some of our biggest clients are the likes of New Balance, we also work with PlayStation. We’ve done a lot of work for UA as well and we’ve worked with big music clients like Beats by Dre. In the past, we’ve also worked on research and campaigns on lots of different sports, like American golf for example. The sports and gaming industry is our kind of bread and butter. However, music has also played a part. In the past, that’s where we originally started. We came up with the “Ear to the ground” name twelve years ago. At that time, our work was originally related to festivals creation and marketing with festivals and that ended up changing to sport and gaming as we adapted. – Callum Bee-MacGregor

I guess there’s three or four key elements to this. First is tenacity. Second is perseverance. Third is inflexibility and then fourth is creative thinking. We live in a world of constant change especially in the world of marketing and sports. Being able to adapt to whatever kind of challenges that you face in your personal and work life is important. You need to push through those, so that’s where the tenacity and perseverance comes in. Being able to overcome those problems is always key, because once you’ve done that, you’re onto the next challenge while keeping in mind what you’ve learned from the previous ones. I think flexibility is always very clear. I mentioned it up front with the way that my life has gone. The creative thinking element is unique as well. It’s not just a case of seeing a problem and coming up with the same kind of solution that other people have already thought of. It’s all about thinking outside the box a little bit, and I’m privileged to work in marketing because we ought to be quite creative generally anyway. I think that’s true for sports as well. There are a lot of creative people in the industry and marketing as well. So, they’re the four key elements according to me. I would say that we need to have those skills. – Callum Bee-MacGregor

Most of the time we work with clients who have a problem they want to solve anyway. That’s why they come to us. They have an idea in mind of how they want to overcome it, but are not too sure exactly about what their audience or the wider landscape believes, whether there is a new or existing audiences they want, etc. They choose us in order to figure out the exact steps that they should take and then we can help them come up with a campaign alongside them. So, it’s not that we going to these clients and these Fortune 500 companies telling them what they should do. We’re actually giving them solutions to the problems they are already facing. Additionally, we do pitch to other clients that don’t necessarily know what they want. In that case, we try to create a collective of people. Instead of going to the 11,000 that we have in the network, we build what we call bespoke and collectors and we pick and choose the right people depending on the brand or the client we’re working with. Then, we get to the heart and the root of any problem that our particular client is having. In that way, we can sensitively put the problems in front of these people and then ask some questions that we know will then give us the answers we’re looking for. We do that by asking them about their passions when it comes to football or what they would like to engage with on social media or anything like that. We collect that information and through surveys for interviews through focus groups, whatever it might take. Then, we can turn that into kind of market research that is then really powerful when it comes to creating the campaigns internally, but also alongside the brands that we work with. – Callum Bee-MacGregor

The first port of call is starting out in a marketing agency. Most of the agencies worth their salt will already be running sort of internships and freelance opportunities and if they’re not, then that’s still fine. We can come on to that later. If they’re offering that opportunity, apply for any role that you are genuinely interested in. If you feel like you are quite creative, don’t wait to develop some experience of being creative, put yourself out there. Tell the people at the agency that you’re really creative, that you’re really passionate about doing X,Y and Z. Apply for a particular freelancer or particular internship and just kind of have at it while you’re young. See what you’re passionate about. Just try everything new that you possibly can because that will lead you in good place down the line, but it will also get your in places that necessarily need a few years of experience. Try your hand in new things whilst you’re at college or university. It’s a good networking experience anyway and gets you to events and eventually helps you get your foot in the door. Once you’re in the door, there’s a different question to be asked but whilst you’re trying to get in the door, just apply and apply and apply. If there’s not an active kind of vacancy in that particular place, still feel free to send through a CD but try to avoid sending a plain one. You need to stand out. These guys aren’t necessarily hiring for a particular position or are very busy so my advice would be to make yourself stand out in whichever way you can. I’m not saying you need to fly an owl with a scrolled-up CD into the agency, but what you can do is try and be a bit more kind of creative with the way that you apply. It doesn’t actually need to be an application, but it can be a video, it can be you filming yourself showcasing a particular kind of skill sets or see marketing agencies’ website, look at a particular brand or client and send through some ideas for what they could do differently? That’s so much better compared to just sending through a CV describing your previous experience and where you went to college. – Callum Bee-MacGregor

One resource you can use is to try to follow the brands and the agencies that you enjoy and could see yourself working for down the line instead of following influencers or anyone that you like on social media. Those guys are constantly putting out content about the things that they’re doing, so you can start to quickly build up an understanding of the types of work that’s been done recently. That will obviously give you a flavor of what’s already been done and therefore what you can avoid in the future if you then end up at an agency yourself. Repeating what other people have done is obviously not what you want to do in marketing. Overall, there are big agencies across the globe like in London, New York, LA, etc. that can be a valuable source of information. The bigger the agencies are living and breathing this constantly and they have kind of bigger pillar clients. They’re constantly posting what people need to know to be a part of that agency in that marketing setup. They’re putting out tips and tricks, requirements and skills that they want candidates to actually have in order to apply there. Additionally, a weird resource you might have not thought about is keeping an eye on the actual listings on job sites because they will be listing the credentials and the skillsets they are looking for in new hires. It may seem weird to think like that, but if they’re telling you the skills that you should have, even if you feel like you probably don’t have that and won’t be applying, that in itself is knowledge that you can take away and start working on. It’s a lesson in itself. If a certain required skill is actually coming up on three or four different agency websites, it’s a sign for you to start developing that skill. – Callum Bee-MacGregor

So, it’s really a mixture of two things. We actively seek new opportunities all the time and we’ve got a big marketing team for ourselves and new business people as well. We haven’t necessarily set ourselves only focusing on football. I’d say it’s a mixture. We will never say no to a rugby client or to an American football client or another sport because it would be stupid to do so. However, it also depends on the way that the agency is working at the minute. What we tend to do actually is aiming ourselves for brands that want to get into a particular sport rather than for the sports rights holders themselves. We already work with rights holders but we speak to a lot of clients and brands that want to position themselves in the market on football to allow themselves to tap into that market of football fans globally. After all, it’s the world’s biggest sport. Therefore, if a brand can partner with a particular kind of football element, it can land themselves very well and eventually grow their own market. Outside of that, we then kind of position ourselves with fashion brands that make all sorts of different lifestyle wears and football wear, with New Balance obviously being the biggest. Apart from that, it’s your typical kind of top tier brands that want to get into that football sponsorship space and we can help them do that because of our vast knowledge and experience. Additionally, there are new and upcoming things happening around the world of gaming and Esports and we’re positioning ourselves to also tap into that. We have a massive network of people that are heavily interested in gaming and sports. We are then able to position ourselves quite well with gaming rights holders, clients or brands that want to get into that space and it’s booming at the minute, E-sports specifically and gaming generally. We worked quite closely with PlayStation recently on the launch of the PS5 and the positive effect of that is having clients come to us to help them get into that state as well. – Callum Bee-MacGregor

I guess the biggest thing I can say is that literally every day is different and some people thrive on that. They like to change it up every day, every week, whatever it is. Some people hate it, they want that routine, they want to know what they have to do every morning and in the afternoon. I personally hate the idea of knowing what my day looks like tomorrow. I wake up and I read my emails, I go through the tasks of the day and I work through them. It takes a lot of effort and collaboration, especially since we’re working from home at the moment. A global pandemic hits the world and you need to kind of be flexible and mix it up. Typically, a normal day involves a lot of team calls and figuring out what we need to achieve. There are also a lot of client calls as well, getting on board with the client and making sure that we’re that we’re hitting the things that they need us to. Another task from my personal list is reaching out to this network of 11,000 people. I need to make sure that they know what we’re doing and the people that we’re working with on particular projects or briefs know what’s coming, whether it’s surveys, video calls, sending out products, etc. This is a case of keeping the people warm. Maybe there are people we’ve not spoken with in a while, maybe the projects that we’ve been working on recently aren’t their niche and we need to make sure they know that we haven’t forgotten about them. They need to feel that they’re still a part of our network. So, it’s very hard to put down what my day today looks like because it’s so different every day but it consists of a lot of client calls, collaboration calls with my team and external calls with the network members. – Callum Bee-MacGregor

I think the biggest thing is recognizing that you need to spend time doing it because otherwise you’ll miss it and spend too much time focusing on the clients, rather than yourself. It’s not easy, I know that for a fact. So, if you are struggling, I want you to know that’s completely normal. It’s that kind of chicken and egg question, right? If you spend too much time on your clients, you won’t have enough time to do your own work. However, if you work too much on your own clients, you’ll feel like you’re spending too much time doing that and fall by the wayside. You need to find that fine balance, whether that’s 80/20 client versus yourself or 70/30. I probably wouldn’t do 50/50 because by doing too much of your own, you might end up getting too many clients calls and end up with so many players. If that happens, hire some more people and cover off the branding itself. Still, that’s probably quite a difficult question to answer but my one advice would be that you need to stand out, but you also need to stand for something. You can’t just stand out and expect to have marketed yourself, ticked the box and be done with it. You need to actually stand for something because nowadays, just standing out isn’t going to cut it. If anyone under the age of 25 sees a brand that doesn’t really stand for something, they won’t accept being affiliated with it or support it. Also, eventually the workforce gets younger and the older kind of generation leaves business. That is going to become more normal as well. So yeah, I would say that being different won’t really cut it. You need to market yourself or your company and provide value by being different. – Callum Bee-MacGregor

Yeah 100%, it’s very similar. I’d definitely say you need to stand for something and you need to be authentic with pretty much everything you’re doing because the market nowadays is too intelligent to not see past that. If you’re not being authentic, you’ll get thrown out. I’d say that in terms of standing for something and standing out, you have to marry those two things together and you can’t go wrong. Be that brand side or your own personal brand. – Callum Bee-MacGregor

I think no one anticipated for this pandemic to last as long as it has, have the impact that it’s probably had. I think that the brands that knew themselves the most have come out at the end of this a lot better than those that didn’t. I think that also comes because their position in the market has been authentic. They’ve not tried to pigeonhole themselves into desperately trying to get clients to buy their products because they supposedly care for the clients. They’ve just done that naturally because of who they are as a brand anyway. I think the ones that have maybe fallen back a little bit are those that maybe didn’t know who they were and tried to preempt the inevitable during this pandemic. Adding the low purchasing power to the mix, etc. they came out as trying to force something that maybe wasn’t there already and that effort came across as poorly done. Everybody probably saw insensitive ads on TV of companies trying to say that they’re here for the customers but they also wanted them to spend money. All those adverts tended to kind of go down the same route whereas those that knew who they were and didn’t have to rely on those kinds of ads tried to emphasize that they’re still going to be here when the customers get back so they encouraged the customers to get themselves safe. That’s what I figured out recently. – Callum Bee-MacGregor

I think it’s a mixture of the two. With time and continually working in a particular industry or field, you end up growing in experience and expertise, etc. and with that, then comes credibility. That credibility then enables you to come up with a particular campaign or project for your clients who may ask for it through RFPs or meetings that you have with the industry leaders. That happens because you then end up developing that credibility through time. With that being said, some of the younger agencies are coming up from nowhere really. People quit their jobs at an agency and start developing their own. They’ve got new ideas, new ways of working, etc. So, it’s not just a case of time in that aspect, it is a mixture of new ideas and new approaches. Just because you’re young and new doesn’t mean that you’re not able to compete with the industry stalwarts really. However, you’ll be up against some of the people that are the best of the best, so you need to really nail whatever it is that you’re bringing to the market. Otherwise, it will probably go to some of the more experienced people. Nonetheless, I don’t think being new or being younger has as much impact as it used to. Obviously, we’re reasonably young in terms of the agency I work for but we’re also able to compete with the likes of some big companies. It’s brilliant but that in itself is due to the kind of USP that we have. Not everyone has this offering that we’re able to give, so some of the brands and clients that we’re able to work with like the fact that we’re very different.  – Callum Bee-MacGregor

I think so, definitely. When it comes to the agencies that are leading the way when it comes to the campaigns and other marketing strategies, it’s very rare for them not to be put up for awards or for them to put their application in for the awards. At those awards shows, you’re clearly up against some big names, so you can naturally develop relationships with them because it would be stupid not to keep an eye on the competition, right? You need to be aware of the types of things they’re working on, the clients that they’re working with, etc. Then you can either internally develop your own campaigns to make sure that you’re bettering them, but also to learn from them and to see what’s being done outside of the ordering and the agency that you’re working in. So yeah, it’s definitely a mix.  I think that it’s intelligent to do that if you’re not already doing it. Get yourself out to networking events, to big sporting events in order to grow your client roster, but also to build those network relationships which will eventually lead to actual work via collaboration. As the old adage goes: “You don’t do work with businesses, you do work with people”. As you start to develop relationships, even though those people can move to a different client or place, they’ll still know that you did great work for them previously, so why wouldn’t you have that conversation? Why wouldn’t you keep a hold on people that you enjoy working with? So, it’s not always that kind of traditional business development that happens all the time. When you do great work for people, you get to keep that relationship even after they move on. – Callum Bee-MacGregor

So, I was very passionate about sport generally as I was growing up and always loved football, always loved sports, professional sports. There’s so much that goes into it that as a fan you maybe don’t realize until you’re in the industry. From the sponsors that get involved to the way those events and matches are presented, there’s so much that goes into the world of sport that you probably don’t even take notice. Also, it’s our job to make you take notice, but that’s a different question. So, I’ve always been passionate about it anyway and it undouble is quite rewarding financially as well. It is a fruitful industry in the marketing side of things and regarding the brands and the clients that we end up working with. It’s not just about what you earn. It’s also about all the other amazing experiences that you get to be a part of. I’ve been lucky enough to go to two Champions League Finals which are some of the hardest tickets to come by and that was directly related to us working with a client like UEFA. Clients like New Balance and PlayStation have also been beneficial in terms of experiences. We’re able to get our hands on some of the latest products and the latest offerings that they have as well as information about all the events and products that I know are going to be coming out once we’re out of this pandemic. In a nutshell, it’s not just financial reward, it’s more about the experience that happens naturally by being invited to matches. There’s a reason these guys are sponsoring big key marquee events like Champions League Finals or further down the line like World Cups or anything that New Balance are massively involved in, all of the sports teams that they sponsor or the athletes themselves. We get to meet these amazing athletes. We did some work recently with Cristiano Ronaldo and you don’t often get to work with an athlete of the highest caliber like him. I know that a lot of people who get started on certain industries are more focused on how much money is this going to earn them, but I feel like that’s because they aren’t able to lean on the more experiential thing, whereas it’s totally different in sports marketing. I’m very lucky to work in this industry.– Callum Bee-MacGregor

I think there’s three elements to it. The first one is that you’ve just got to be hard working generally. Doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, you have to be hard working unless you don’t want to kind of become successful. However, that’s not enough. I’m sure you’ve met people in your own workforce, they are hard working but aren’t able to enjoy their work and it’s not enjoyable being around them. You need to be able to hold a relationship with people while still going through the grind. It could be 2:00 AM, you might have just come off a flight, you’ve got a lot of work to do but you still need to be nice to the waitress that’s giving you the coffee, right? If you’re not, what’s the point of that hard-working mentality, focus and drive if you are turning into a bit of jerk? So, you need to find that balance. You need to know when to work hard and be able to counterbalance that by still being a good person because that leads into how your life and career evolves. You’ll be regarded as being a good person while still managing to generate results and get that kind of work over the line, etc. Besides being kind and hardworking, one of the biggest things I learned early on was the importance of being attentive to details. It’s such an obvious, easy thing to think about but in principle it’s actually not that easy to practice. Being able to have good attention to detail will get you into a lot of places that you maybe weren’t able to get to previously. I’ve got a background in data and you need to clearly know the data and make sure that it’s accurate and must have attention to detail there. It’s also about making sure to kind of sign off your emails properly and know that you’ve covered all the questions that client asked without them having to reply to you and say that you forgot one. You need to get yourself out of your own head and make sure that you’ve covered off all the things that you said you were going to achieve. That will definitely help with relationship building, will help with coming across as a good person, etc. So, I would definitely advise to pay attention to detail and make sure that you’re not too focused on particular elements that you forget others. I feel like that’s definitely got me in a good stead with where I’m at in my career. – Callum Bee-MacGregor

Generally, I think that early on in my career and college, I didn’t throw myself into as many things as I maybe could have. I’m looking at myself at 20 years old thinking I should have joined that society at UNI, should have explored that relationship a bit more with that particular team or should have thrown a CD out to more. Obviously, I’m happy with where I am now, I’m still doing really well. However, looking back, I wish I would have tried a new kind of scale or tried to add a new creative arm there or done something a bit differently. I would say that is probably my biggest mistake. I ended up pigeonholing myself into something that I love anyway, but maybe I’ve only explored only a small portion of what I should have. I’m also really interested in working abroad. I’ve only really had a career in the UK and I did work a little bit in Germany, but it wasn’t really in my career field, I did it just to keep myself going. Maybe one of the things I’d like to try, the biggest thing I’ve not done yet is working abroad. It’s become a little difficult to work in the EU since Brexit so it might mean that I have to go a bit further afield. Even so, who knows what’s going to happen? The world is your oyster, right? – Callum Bee-MacGregor

I think that to my biggest success so far is going from an intern in a sports CRM agency at 21 to becoming a senior manager at one of the UK’s best sports marketing agencies. It took a lot of hard work, learning, networking and eventually just leaping opportunities that show themselves and learning from people that have helped define my career. Keeping in touch with people that you might have only met once in a client meeting and keeping them aware of what’s happening in your own career, will be very beneficial because they might show their face further down the line that can lead to a new opportunity. So, I’m not going to single out a specific campaign or a specific piece of work because I feel like that doesn’t do justice to the whole thing as a success. I’d say that generally, this is my success story. – Callum Bee-MacGregor

One of the biggest advices I have is that you need to be able to shift. If you hate your job but you’ve got a good bank account, what are you really doing with your life? That’s all well and good but if you’re living Monday to Friday, hating every hour of every day and then loving evenings and weekends, that’s not a life that anyone really wants to have. You need to switch it up. You need to try new things, try a different path. You need to switch courses a little bit. I’d encourage anyone to shift when they need to shift. Shift when you feel you’re giving too much focus to some things that are not bringing you any happiness. Shift when you notice that you’re not happy in what you’re doing or you’re not enjoying a particular route that you’re going down. There’s no harm in changing course in this day and age. In this world, people are able to pivot reasonably quickly digitally. It’s a lot easier nowadays than it used to be back in the day of not having networks that are on your phone, no Instagram, not being on LinkedIn, not being on any social media sites. Everything was done by paper and you needed to network with people you knew in your town, not people in a different country in a different city. So, I would say it’s a lot easier now to probably change career paths or trajectories or anything like that. I guess another piece of advice would be to take note of how you’re feeling on a day-to-day basis and if you aren’t happy, make a change because life is too short, right? We don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know if a pandemic is going to hit or if some bad things are going to happen. You need to enjoy as much of it as you can because otherwise, you’ll be stuck on a lockdown again and you won’t be able to leave your house. – Callum Bee-MacGregor