Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer: ‘We’re Hiring Creatives At Every Level’

By Donya Blaze 

When Ian Schafer started his interactive agency Deep Focus, his goal was to “bust the silos” of traditional marketing, meaning find ways to market to consumers across media verticals rather than simply within them. Now that the boutique agency has been going nine years strong, the CEO reveals what you can do to get a job with his company.

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“We’re hiring creatives at every level,” he said in our Media Beat interview. “The challenging part about finding people for us right now is that, while we love specialists, what we really want are what the industry would call ‘T-shaped people.’ People with kind of a broad understanding, a generalist perspective, but an expertise in a particular vertical.”

If you’d rather start your own agency, says Schafer, you better be a people person.

“This business, I’m finding, is definitely personality-led,” he explained. “So, if you’re demure, if you don’t like to network, if you don’t like to tweet, then it’s going to make it that much more difficult for you.”

Part 1: Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer: ‘We Struck Gold’ With Mad Men Yourself

Part 3: Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer On The Myth of Viral Strategy

Ian Schafer talks about best practices for social media marketing in his keynote presentation at Socialize on April 1 in New York. You can also watch this video on the mediabistro.com YouTube channel.

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