David joined Medialab just under 2 years ago, and has been a driving force in helping to deliver some record breaking results across a number of our client partners as a Senior Account Director. With expertise in digital and TV, David also works closely with our enabler teams…

8.30am

I’m not really a morning person, so I have enjoyed spending what would be commuting time in bed. I’d much rather get my work done later in the evening over an early start. But once I have managed to get up, I’ll make a coffee and then check through my to do list and calendar, before joining our regular team morning meeting at 9am.

10am

First port of call is to jump on Apollo, our data marketing platform, as soon as I can to refresh the campaigns that I’m working on. It’s an incredible tool, that both we and our client partners have access to – for example for Guide Dogs, we can quite literally see from the activity we have live how many donations we have driven from the previous day.

10.30am

Alongside digital, a big area of my focus is given towards TV. With that, I keep in close contact with the Medialab TV team, and we talk daily about a number of things. Today, for example, I’m chatting with Sian (AV Manager) and Joe (AV Executive), running through delivery to make sure that the budgets we’ve assigned by station are being adhered to, and also to get an update on any exciting programming opportunities coming up. But our conversations can range from anything to do with quality metrics (such as position in break and peak delivery) to getting our campaigns in the best programming slots, and checking performance against the plan to make sure we are going above and beyond.

11.30am

A recurring conversation topic with our partners at the moment is around iOS14, and the implications of the update on our social campaigns. So, we are meeting regularly with Facebook, to make sure that all our campaigns are running smoothly from a technical point of view.

11.45am

I’m line manager to Ben (Account Executive), so we have weekly catchups to check in and see how he’s getting on. Our catchups will vary from discussing the day to day work, to bigger longer-term projects about development, and also to a general chat about life in lockdown and how we’ve been keeping ourselves entertained (hint: it’s not massively exciting!)

Lunch

I’ll tune into the regular ‘LiveLab’ sessions at midday, where someone from the company spends ten minutes talking to everyone about what they’ve been up to. Then I’ll make sure to get out for a walk – my 10,000 steps are not happening at the moment. I live in East London, so it will just be a quick lap around the block. One of the perks of living in the city is that I’ll sometimes treat myself to a delivery Pret for lunch; a small reminder of what life used to be like. And on Wednesday Medialab have introduced a virtual Yoga session which is hosted by a trained instructor. As you can imagine, most of us have our cameras off, myself included. But it’s a decent stretch and very relaxing.

2pm

On Wednesday’s, we have our weekly catchup with the Committed Giving team at Guide Dogs. It’s a really exciting time working with Guide Dogs, and running through the results on Apollo with them and reviewing their cross channel model setup is fantastic. The two core products I work on are Sponsor a Puppy and Lucky Lottery, and I’ll lead the weekly update on results across channels here. I’ll also share any insights from our TV team, of which there are plenty.

4pm

I’m part of the Medialab mentorship program, and so will have a monthly catchup with my mentor, who is our Chief Planning Officer, Will. It’s been a really good opportunity to talk through my work and how it relates back to any challenges in new things I’m learning. We talk through new areas of focus any challenges I might be experiencing, changes to campaigns that I can seek guidance on, as well as the changes to our working environment due to lockdown. A lot of it is also discussing the best ways to progress in our industry, and Will is a great person to talk to about that.

6pm

My wife and I work in different rooms, so at the end of the day we’ll come and meet in the middle and make dinner together. After dinner, it’s the usual story of working our way through Amazon Prime or Netflix (currently, it’s Schitt’s Creek), and then I’ll logon to Call of Duty for a couple of games before bed with my friends – it’s been an amazing way of keeping in touch with them!

If you weren’t at Medialab, what would you be doing?

I studied Biomedical Science at Uni, so I’d probably have ended up being a biomedical scientist for the NHS – which would have been quite interesting right now…