Two schools. Hundreds of designs. An agency spending ₹2.5 lakhs a month. And reports that explained nothing.
I was the ATL Instructor at New Horizon Public School in Indiranagar. Ran the tinkering lab, taught kids to build things. Marketing wasn't anywhere in my job description.
Then COVID shut everything down and someone needed to get 800 students into online classrooms.
I set up Microsoft Teams for the entire school. Every teacher, every class, every schedule. Parents kept getting locked out, so I built an automated password reset system with Power Automate. The IT ticket queue dropped by 90%. Not bad for a tinkering lab instructor.
Around this time I noticed the school's Instagram had 90 followers and hadn't posted in months. Parents were stuck at home with no idea what was happening inside the school. Nobody was talking to them online.
So I just started posting. No brief. No approval process. Nobody asked me to.
Posts, reels, long-form YouTube videos with students. Shot them, edited them in DaVinci Resolve, posted them. All me. The content averaged around 2,000 views per post, which for a school account spending zero on ads, I'll take.
Teachers started sending me content ideas. Parents started tagging the school in stories. It went from "that thing Arun does" to how the school actually communicated with families.
I didn't have words for what I was doing at the time. Content strategy, organic growth, community management. I was just trying to show parents their kids were fine. By the time I moved to New Horizon International School in 2022, I'd accidentally become a social media marketer. I wanted to learn the paid side.
NHIS in Hennur was a newer school under the same group. CBSE and Cambridge curriculum, building enrollment from scratch. I came on as graphic designer and digital marketer. In practice, I was the in-house creative team and the agency was running paid campaigns with about ₹2.5 lakhs a month across Google Ads and Meta.
Over three years I made hundreds of creatives. Social posts, ad sets for Meta and Google, event materials, print collateral, brochures, hoardings. If it needed designing, it came through me. If it needed strategy, it went to the agency.
It's a saying. Means dressing something up to look better than it is. That was the monthly report. Slides with graphs, numbers going up, "performance summary" headers. Looked professional. Said almost nothing.
I'd ask what targeting they were using. Vague answer. I'd ask why a campaign was structured a certain way. Different vague answer. I was the one making every creative they ran, and I couldn't tell you why any given ad was set up the way it was.
I figured this was just how agencies worked. I was self-taught, coming from a teaching job. What did I know? So I kept making creatives and kept reading reports I didn't fully trust.
Impressions, clicks, leads. That's where the report ended. Did those leads pick up the phone? Were they in the right area? Did they actually enroll? Nobody tracked it. Nobody asked.
What audiences were these for? What had been tested before? What worked last month? I never got a clear answer. I was closest to the brand and furthest from the decisions.
I'd send a creative. It would run. Leads would come in. Someone would call them. That's it. No one ever said "this one worked because..." or "try more of that." Every month started from zero.
At the time, I thought the gap between me and the agency was experience. They were the professionals. I was the guy who'd stumbled into marketing from a tinkering lab.
I didn't figure this out at New Horizon. I figured it out at Kai, when I finally had to do everything myself.
The agency tracked "leads generated." So at Kai, I tracked what happened after: warm, not interested, wrong location, never picked up. Every lead, every week. Because I'd spent three years wondering what happened to all those form submissions.
The agency reports were vague. So at Kai, I wrote monthly reports with honest "what didn't work" sections and weekly lead breakdowns. Because I'd spent three years reading slides that told me nothing useful.
The agency never told me which creatives worked. So at Kai, I tracked which ad generated which leads and whether those leads were worth anything. Because I'd spent three years designing in the dark.
I'm not here to trash the agency. I'm saying I learned what good marketing looks like by spending three years close enough to see what was missing.
I'm looking for performance marketing roles where I can bring this kind of honesty to the work. If that sounds useful, say hello.