how becoming ‘uni famous’ led me to digital marketing.
I often had my head up in the clouds – a full-time daydreamer. I was that kid who doodled in their schoolbooks and ‘tried’ writing song lyrics and wasn’t fully engaged in the classroom. I would dream of becoming a world-famous musician, pro skateboarder and snowboarder, multilingual jet setter, graphics artist…and storyteller. Well, here I am telling a story!
If it wasn’t immediately apparent in the first paragraph, I live for creativity and expressing myself in imaginative ways that appeal to others, evoking a certain emotion or a desire to take action in some way, be it through music, art, or the written word. It’s what I’ve always loved to do, so when it came to picking my GCSE choices at school, Media Studies was a no-brainer. Of course, I also picked other creative subjects such as Music, Art…and Computing – purely so I could spend more time experimenting with the Macromedia suite which we all know today as the Adobe CC suite.
I immediately fell in love with Media Studies. It enabled me to use my creative skills in such a way that other subjects couldn’t. It wasn’t creativity for creativity’s sake; it was creativity with an agenda. I loved the constraint of being presented with a brief and, through those limitations, finding an out-of-the-box solution that executed the desired result effectively. However, at that point in time, I struggled with English, and the concern about passing my English GCSE was growing. Ironically, here I am today writing to you as a highly proficient writer…and yes, I passed my English GCSE!
After GCSEs & A Levels, I still didn’t have a solid idea of where I was going. I held off from going to University and instead (to stay productive), went to college to study Game Design. In short, yes it was fun, but I learned that I excelled mostly in the story design, business pitching, and management aspects of the course. It was also around this time that I started watching the series Mad Men, and then the metaphorical lightbulb blinked above my head.
September 2013 saw me stepping foot on the Old Royal Naval College campus of the University of Greenwich, on my way to my first lecture on Advertising & Marketing. Our first assignment was to get into groups, and think of a product that humans use that could also be (technically) used by an animal, using at least one of the 7 adverting appeals (music, sex, humour, fear, rationality, emotions, and scarcity), market that product towards the personified animal in the form of a TV ad. Utterly ridiculous – but not ridiculous enough.
“How about eye-shadow remover for a panda?” I said to my team. It took them a minute to join the dots, then roars of laughter ensued. Being the keen musician that I am, I pleaded the case to focus on using music as our main advertising appeal and quickly wrote the sappiest love song on my ukulele. The team was sold. We filmed everything, I edited the video, and even superimposed a real panda into our ad through painstaking frame-by-frame cropping of someone’s zoo visit from YouTube. I threw the song into the ad and uploaded it to YouTube to submit the assignment, and what happened next completely caught me off guard…
Through the powers of social media, I became a celebrity within my university overnight! Some vaguely familiar acquaintances rolled up to me saying, “Love the song! Is it downloadable?” or “Hey Tim! I didn’t know you could sing!” - autotune is a wonderful thing. It turned out one of my friends shared the ad across all the University’s various student Facebook groups! It was at this moment that a new-found interest in harnessing the power of social media and digital marketing was born.
Like most students, coffee shops were my church so, in my final year at Uni, I wrote my dissertation on the effects user-generated content on Twitter had on brand perception, with competing coffee chains Starbucks and Costa Coffee being the context of the study, scoring a solid 80% grade.
I then ventured off into the world of Digital Marketing, working for a B2B tech PR firm, a programmatic advertising exchange, eco-friendly broadband, and phone provider, and a non-profit government body…and then I found my calling at Raffingers as Digital Marketing Executive, having the opportunity to use all my creative skills and work alongside such a uniquely talented and dedicated team. I love that there is a real focus on skill development, something that was missing from previous roles in the past. Having the freedom to comfortably give and receive constructive criticism is so refreshing and enables us to all grow as individuals so we can produce the best work possible for our clients.
