Josh is a mainstay at Medialab, having joined in 2018. As part of one of the client teams, Josh has found his niche in digital, whereby he manages a number of accounts and supports them in all stages of delivering cross-channel campaigns. And so here, Josh tells us what a day in his life looks like…
Morning
I’m not quite the passionate early riser I’d like to be, and I still haven’t got to the point in life where I’m going to the gym before work, however morning routine is fairly standard. I’ll always have the radio or music on in my headphones when travelling in on the tube.
I’ll find my seat at work, get setup and dive into catchups with the team. We’ll go through live campaign performance, check in on the industry platforms, and share any exciting developments or anything relevant for our clients that will help them in current or upcoming campaigns. My specialty is digital, so I’ll bring anything new to the table from a social, PPC, digital display point of view.
10.30
Things are different everyday, it’s a really dynamic working environment and I’m kept on my toes. Often in the mornings I’ll have strategic check ins with our clients, to look at any potential optimisations. I’ll then take those conversations back to our team and see how we can make them work in the specific platforms, like testing new audiences or creatives, or moving budgets around to test new channels. We are working on a brilliant campaign with Sue Ryder at the moment, called Grief Kind, that looks to inform and give people the confidence to support their loved ones through grief. We’ve done lots of big outdoor banners, Facebook, Youtube, and recently as an extension of that, the Grief Kind podcast was listed as one of Apple’s feature shows on their carousel.
11.30
It’s not just current campaigns and optimisation, but also taking briefs from our partners for upcoming activity. It’s always exciting getting a new brief in and building up options for how we think best bring it life. We’ll then conduct the audience research (Touchpoints/YouGov) to understand their media attitudes. This will in turn inform what channels we use, and as a result, the budget. Naturally, a lot of what we do can also influence the creative output developed by their creative partner. Media and creative are so intertwined so it’s great working collaboratively in this way.
Lunch
Depending on how hungry I was the night before; my lunch will usually consist of leftovers or the Tesco salad bar – can’t beat it. A walk around Soho with some friends from the office before heading back to crack on with the afternoon.
1.30
One of the teams I work closest with is the Apollo team. Apollo is our marketing intelligence platform, and its where all our clients campaign data sits which provides them and us with a really transparent single view of performance. For one of our clients, we are launching a new product, and so I’m working with the Apollo team to get those data feeds setup in an Apollo dashboard – we figure out what live results would be most useful for us all to see. Outside of that, there’s plenty of cross team communications and collaboration – there has to be. We have specialist teams for anything from TV to data engineering, and not a day goes by that I’m getting support from at least one of them to help deliver better performance. And it’s all educational; as I said my experience is centred around digital, and so it’s great to learn from an expert specialising in an offline channel.
3pm
There’s a strong culture of development at Medialab, and there are always internal and external training sessions on offer. I recently went to the Facebook Agency Summit, where we heard from lots of speakers sharing innovations on the platform, which I’ll take and always look through with the lens of our clients needs. But today I completed part of Mental Health Training series that Medialab have been sharing, which I think we have all appreciated given the number of lockdowns we’ve been through over the last year.
4.30pm
I work with a couple of colleagues on a monthly internal newsletter, called Together We Stand. Together We Stand is a company initiative that emerged in the wake of George Floyd’s death, to give us a space to have conversations about social inequalities and injustices and share resources. For the newsletter, I’ll keep a running log of what’s been happening in the world and what would be appropriate to share in that month’s newsletter edition.
6pm
As I haven’t upgraded to pre-work gym, I’ll squeeze that in after I’ve finished up in the office. Otherwise, given that we are in such a prime location in Soho, it’s a bit of a meeting point for seeing friends and catching up.
If you weren’t at Medialab what would you be doing?
Would’ve loved to be a DJ – could see myself on the ones and twos.