PRE-MORNING  

Before work, I head to Pret; got to maximise on the subscription. Then I hop on the overground into work. I have the Blinkist subscription, which is a service Medialab pays for. It’s an app which holds a huge collection of non-fiction books which are condensed down to 15-minute summaries, so I’ll listen to some productivity books. Then I’m in the office ready to start work.  

MORNING  

I start the day by checking our Apollo data streams before heading into our morning stand-up. This is a very quick check-in with the team where we each share our tasks for the day with our project manager, someone assigned to oversee the functionality of Apollo. Apollo is our proprietary marketing intelligence platform, it’s live 24/7 and allows our client partners to see and understand how the optimisations the client teams have activated are performing.  We do morning stand-ups each day, so everyone is aligned.  

Then I settle into my work; I start by going through our client team requests, which may involve creating custom KPIs. We do this if the client team can’t pull a specific average from the platform itself, we’ll work to create that for them. Then, I move on to dashboard requests for any new campaigns going live. I will then build this out, which involves pulling the relevant data and visualising it.  

After this we have a triage meeting, this is an opportunity to prioritise and rebalance the workload amongst the team, which is very important. Again, we do this each day, as it’s important to have oversight on how everyone is getting on and attribute support accordingly.  

LUNCH 

For lunch, I’ll head to a little café on Little Portland Street and get the lasagne which is a firm favourite of mine. I either head back to the office to sit with mates to eat, or head out for a walk and grab another Pret coffee.  

AFTERNOON  

Some afternoons we have a brainstorming session on data visualisation. This is important as it makes the data more accessible and easier to articulate a story. It’s important that we keep things fresh and if there are better, more impactful ways to visualise data, this is the time to explore that. We also take the opportunity to review our ways of working strategies, which are designed to improve our efficiency and consistency. Then, I conduct some in-house training. We’ll go through any problem areas so that they’ll be able to self-serve some of their requests going forward, these sessions are great for building greater transparency between Apollo and the client teams.  

LATE AFTERNOON  

I have the final check-in of the day with my manager. This will be a time to address any blockers that may be inhibiting my progress on any tasks and if I need support, plus a general catch-up. Before the day ends, we have an interesting MediaTed on AI; our Data Innovation Manager has been doing a lot of research into how Medialab could leverage AI to improve the efficiency of our day-to-day tasks, so it’ll be interesting to see the result of this.  

IF YOU WEREN’T AT MEDIALAB WHAT YOU BE DOING? 

Travelling photographer. I am really into photography, and I love to travel, so it seems like the perfect pairing! 

WHAT TIPS WOULD YOU GIVE SOMEONE LOOKING TO GET INTO THE DATA ANALYTICS FIELD? 

Definitely keep an eye on current trends or exciting developments in the data space. Right now, the rapid development of AI is something to watch! Alongside this, always have an inquiring mind for how you might improve things and, on top of the relevant qualifications, just be curious!