Having joined Medialab fairly recently, Maddy has become an integral part of the the Offline team  as their Account Manager, supporting projects across a whole range of clients. As we move past over 100 days of lockdown, we hear about her day…

7.30am

First thing I do when I wake up is my morning skincare routine, and I’m not really a breakfast person, so it’ll be a glass of water and maybe some fruit. I also like to have a pre-emptive check of my emails, so I know what’s coming for that morning – don’t like to be surprised!

9am

Each day, we have a Zoom check in with our team, to see what everyone’s workload is looking like and how we can all support each other. I work as part of the Offline ‘enabler’ team (main channels that we work on in the offline team are inserts, press advertising and various different mailing distributions, i.e. Door Drops, Direct Mail and Partially Addressed Mail), that supports client accounts across a number of projects. So depending on what I’m currently working on, I’ll join that client team’s morning call.

As part of the offline team, my role revolves around helping client teams respond to a brief, but everyday is different. For example, this morning I received an email from Lottie (Senior Account Exec) who gave me a rough outline of the brief for one of our charity clients. It was for an insert campaign to support their Xmas Raffle campaign, focusing on several key KPI’s. They also share the spec and previous creative so I’ve got a full picture of the campaign. First thing to do is go to different media owners, ask for availability on titles for that brief. Once I’ve got that, I’ll collate all the info and build it into a plan. My approach is generally to over-plan and send something back to the team that has lots of different options so they can tweak, add and remove as they think will work best for the client.

There’s obviously a lot of back and forth so we’ve had to adjust how we communicate in lockdown.

Midday

Speaking of communication, every day in our LiveLab, we have someone from Medialab take 10 minutes to talk to the whole company about what they’ve been up to, or any general observation they’ve taken away from lockdown. After tuning in, I’ll make some lunch. I’m on a bit of a health kick at the moment, so really enjoying cooking – a luxury that this pandemic has given me!

1.30pm

In the afternoon, I’ll carry on working through the plan I was building in the morning, but also dip into some smaller client projects that we have running. Although I love working on the not-for-profit projects, it’s refreshing to have variation, and the chance to provide support on the retail/clothing partners we have is great. I’ll usually talk to the client, sort out any queries around options they have for inserts, and deal with any questions or issues around printing.

3.30pm

Some post campaign support. I’m currently helping out a client with booking some inserts with media owners and making sure that all the right info has gone over to the printers – a lot of logistics! It’s something I like to think I’m quite good at – which makes it fun.

5.30pm

At the moment, I’ve been heavily involved in a Workplace group (our internal company comms platform), that was inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, but encompasses all manner of inequalities/injustices. It’s designed to act as a place to share resources, literature and content that promote education around social inequalities. So, I’ll check out what people have been sharing that day, and add something that I’ve found. For example, today I posted about some Mediatel events coming up around The Future of Diversity.

Evening

I live with one of my friends; we both moved to London from Bristol only months apart! We take turns cooking – I’m an Instagram addict, my newsfeed consists of food and recipes (as well as the occasional selfie!). I’ll get some inspiration from there, make it and then post it back on my timeline! A beautiful circle. This evening it’s Disney film, Princess and the Frog, with some wine, followed by bed. Can’t beat that.

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

I’d be a makeup artist on a TV show – make up has always been a side passion of mine and my ever growing collection is testament to that!