Ellie Edwards, managing director at WPP performance marketing agency Quisma, catches up on her Sunday supplement reading, gets hiring at the rapidly expanding agency, and steals a go on her husband’s iPad 3 birthday gift.
Monday
I wake up at 6:15am – my usual time after my husband gets out of the shower. With both of us working full time and with two small children, our morning routine is like military precision. Kiss FM accompanies the children’s breakfast – it scares me that at five and two, they know all the latest tunes.
I opt for the Metro on the train ride to work. Tesco has opted for a wraparound for their Everyday Value range (an attempt for them to regain the No.1 supermarket slot). There’s not much news today, so I opt for a read-through of my Twitter feed for the rest of the journey.
The morning is a blur of meetings with the team…planning for the week, campaign updates etc, I conduct an off-site interview at lunchtime and then quickly grab a sandwich at my desk while catching up on The Sunday Times Business supplement, which I never get to read on a Sunday.
The afternoon sees another three meetings somehow squeezed into my week, and two lunches arranged for the following fortnight. I leave the office at six as I prefer to work at home once the kids are in bed.
Today it’s Emeli Sandé on the iPod on the way home, while I flick through the Sunday Times Style magazine.
Tuesday
The downside to staffing up is interviewing and the early starts, however my weekly Grazia fix, with a quick scour of Twitter, helps the journey on the 6:42am train.
Attend an important meeting to talk EU ePrivacy Directive compliance. Econsultancy recently published that only 23% of users would opt into cookies – a scary stat for our industry, which highlights the fact that the general public need to be better educated as to the benefits of cookies.
I manage to fit in a lunchtime Powerplate class and vow to go at least once more before the week is through.
Wednesday
Try to head into the office early to deal with few things that have come up. Southern Trains has other ideas, but I’m thankful to have a seat on the train and make use of the time sending emails, and speaking to my marketing department in Germany.
A quick team meeting when I get in brings me up to speed with May’s current activity. Because Quisma offers all areas of performance marketing from retargeting, dynamic creative optimisation and affiliate marketing to RTB, customer journey analysis and offline sales modelling, these meeting are never dull.
We’re still in an embryonic stage, in terms of size of team, so I’m able to keep a hands-on approach – which is good, because a function of working in an RTB environment is that a lot can happen while you’re sleeping (or even blinking sometimes).
The morning is spent in meetings, first with a potential partner and then a couple of internal meetings, including one with GroupM finance.
Then I’m locked away in the office with only time away from my desk to collect a new mywardrobe purchase -due to a lack of time, I do about 70% of all my shopping online. I skip Powerplate and head home. While putting my two year-old daughter to sleep, I get to play around on my husband’s iPad 3, a birthday gift from me.
Thursday
Another early start, this time straight to the Propel offices where we are hosting our second SWAT event (Supporting Women Ad Technologists). It’s a good turnout and we have a great speaker – Shaa Wasmund, whose business book ‘Stop Talking, Start Doing’ is top of The Times’ best-seller list.
I push back a lunch meeting to interview a potential candidate.
Lunch is at Wild Honey with Matt Bush, head of agency sales at Google. We worked together 10 years ago at VNU, so the first half hour is spent catching up before talking business. As ever with Google, there’s always something new and this time it’s Attribution and Conversion, plus an update on Trueview and Performance Video.
I’m a guest of Julia Smith at Jemm Media at the British Media Awards, where the host is accompanied by a gay choir.
Friday
I do my weekly 8am call with my chief executive and chief finance officer from home, and head to a 10am meeting. No time to read the Metro today as I’m catching up on emails. I use BlackBerry for work, even though I love my iPhone, I type faster with a keypad.
I pop over to CSG for a midday meeting at Mindshare. It takes us less than five minutes to clear security – a record in this building.
Meeting done, I head to Charlotte Street for lunch. As usually happens, I bump into a few industry faces.
Our office fortnightly drinks trolley makes an appearance at 4pm, it’s always guaranteed to get people out of their chairs and mingling. I meet with the team for an update before the weekend and then have a call with Ken Parnham from OpenX in LA.
I meet Fleur Bennett from Google (Admeld) for one quick glass of wine on the way to meet my husband for dinner at Applebee’s in Borough Market, and the weekend begins.