I hate Media Planning .. help? any advice?
Some background - I graduated in Summer 2021 aka right after Covid. My last year and a half of college was completely online and i’ll admit I definitely slacked and had a hard time learning anything during that time. I was nervous about getting a job after graduation since it was the aftermath of the pandemic and I was hearing horror stories about the job market at the time, especially for grads. I got very lucky - a couple months before graduating, I got a job offer from an Agency I interned with the year before. The job was Associate Media Planner. Of course i hopped on that offer ASAP considering how difficult finding a job was gonna be and how desperate i was for a job. I started and immediately felt so lost. I got trained on how to use MediaTools and Mbox/Prisma .. and that was pretty much it. I got the hang of it quickly, but never felt like i got a handle on actually planning/strategizing. I felt like i missed a few classes in college, because i never understood what was going on or what being a media planner actually means or how to even do that. I also was hoping the role would be more creative and i was surely mistaken. Never thought i’d be looking at so many excel sheets. I felt so lost and terrible at my job, But I figured fake it till you make it.
It’s 5 years later, im still at the same agency, have only gotten one promotion (sr associate) and i still feel lost and terrible at my job and i think it’s no longer ok to fake it till i make it. i’ve worked on 3 different accounts, so been working with different teams and never felt like I had someone to really make sure i knew what i was doing or to take me under their wing in any way. I feel like i should know a lot more than I do by now, but for some reason i just don’t understand anything about Media Planning. it’s not clicking for me. It doesn’t help that 90% of my job is looking at excel sheets and numbers everyday. i’m creating trackers for trackers. i dont even know what im looking at anymore. i hate it. i hate that all i do everyday is crunching numbers and filling out trackers until my eyes and brain hurt.
Maybe media planning is just not for me, but what is? and idk how to get out of it. I feel stuck in a job i hate. We all know the job market sucks right now. i have no idea how to get out of here. any advice? which jobs/roles would be a good transition?