Drive your own bus: the marketing career on-ramp

The grunt work is the apprenticeship

Bronwyn Pretorius — now CMO of Ackermans — started by checking product and price on millions of Shoprite leaflets. Chantal Riley started on media lists she hated making. None of them describe that work as beneath them, because each attached something to it that compounded. Bronwyn attached visibility: "If anybody needed anything I could do — pick me, I'll do it," building relationships she still holds. Chantal attached notes: remembering a journalist's sick dog turned cold calls into a career-long ledger. The task is the ticket; the relationships and reputation you attach to it are the career.

Build the fundamentals deliberately

Dean Lurie's advice for entering a technical craft generalises to all of them: find a mentor ("someone who shows you not just the fundamentals but how to tell a story through data"); build a sandbox — his dummy Google Ads account with no credit card is the perfect metaphor for consequence-free practice; and construct a learning habit that needs no willpower — his separate Gmail just for industry newsletters means one focused read a day keeps him current. His thesis supervisor's line outlived the thesis: "You can't build skyscrapers on foundations that aren't strong."

Drive your own bus

Tracey-Lee Zürcher-Campbell carries a mantra from a UK trainer named Cheryl: drive your own bus. It sounded silly; it became her operating system. When CRM was new, she made herself the expert nobody else was and rode it into leadership.

"I went to work every day and did the work that was given to me. Now I make my own work. I don't take instruction, I make instruction. That's the difference between being a marketing leader and simply being a marketer."

Dylan Bosman's version took him from third hire to Director of Marketing in four years: "Act like you're already in the role you're aiming to be in." Take the responsibility nobody owns, and do it well. His answer to the fear of being exploited is the healthiest in the archive: "The best investment is in your own skills, and the best way to grow your skills is to grow your responsibility. You take those skills with you."

Try this week: if you're early-career, set up the newsletter inbox and the sandbox — both take an hour. Identify the unowned task one level up and start it, without asking for the title first. If you lead juniors, hand one of them a grunt task with its attachments explained. That's mentorship.

Driving your own bus is easier with passengers who know the route — a practical guide to networking for South African marketers.

Sourced from recorded, on-the-record interviews on the South African Digital Marketing Podcast. Every practitioner quoted above is named in the text.