About Me

My name is Marieke, nice to meet you. I’m a woman in the creative world of advertising, content and marketing. I co-own an agency for over seven years. An agency that I didn’t start, but where I grew up as a professional. I never thought of running an agency until life took this turn for me.

Short sidestep for my male readers: my brother played football at Ajax. Whenever I’m out of conversation stuff I drop this line, and males tend to listen carefully. After I have their attention (again) I tell them the truth that at the age of seventeen, after playing at Ajax for more than five years, my parents quite tired of bringing them om a daily basis, they appeared to be not good enough and they kept playing football as amateurs. The good thing: to me it’s a good attention grabber. 

I played volleyball by the way. Still play, but no need to come and watch the games. We’re having fun though.

Coming from a family of highly competitive sporty’s I found out soon after I started working as a journalist and later on at the agency I co-own these days, that in running an agency you have to be competitive. The agency is never perfect. There’s always the next quarter and your clients are never totally yours, nor are the people that work for you. You have to stay focussed.

Isn’t that always the case?

Of course, in any line of business you need focus. It’s just that in an agency a few months of sloppiness can be fatal. Insurance companies can be sloppy for years and be still in business. An agency can be out of business within three months.

So, I’m a mother of two (boy and girl, thank you very much), married to a telco professional, living in the Netherlands.

In our agency I’m the one who loves the processes, the key numbers, the HR-side. Of course I truly love the creative work our people produce. But I also, and in that way I’m a bit different I suppose, love the monthly financial statements. I like the coloured graphs, that often show that we’re going the right way.

A creative turned into a business type, that’s me. We’re quite grounded at our agency, but if I would live in the US of A I’d probably have the COO-title in my LinkedIn-profile. Here I’m called ‘managing partners operations.’

One thing I found out is that one of my passions is discussing the business side of an agency. That’s the sole reason that I write this book (multimedia, concept thing).

Have fun, enjoy yourself, make money.

Marieke