My Media Week: Mark Field

Everything is awesome this week for Mark Field, director of invention, Trinity Mirror Solutions, as he pitches to Boots, wins First Great Western and plays lots and lots of Lego.

Mark Field: director of invention, Trinity Mirror Solutions
Mark Field: director of invention, Trinity Mirror Solutions

Monday

Every morning is pandemonium in my house. I have a seven year old and a (nearly) four year old and they're always up at the crack of dawn.

After the kids are sorted and ready for the day I jump on the central line at Buckhurst Hill, fire up the iPad and have just over half an hour to catch-up on my emails and read the Daily Mirror before I arrive at our offices in Canary Wharf.

On Monday mornings we kick off the week with our senior leadership team meeting, led by James Wildman our CRO. These are focused on driving cultural change internally, making sure our external messages are aligned and the whole business is pulling in the same direction.

I'm then on to a conference call with a big retailer whose name I can't mention just yet, who we're working with to develop a cutting-edge content partnership across our regional and national newsbrands. Suffice to say it's one of the most exciting campaigns we've developed yet.

We have a lot of brand content briefs on the table currently, so my afternoon is taken up reviewing concepts in tissue meetings with our project management and planning teams.

We place a big emphasis on understanding the brand in the context of our audience first, which means we go into every pitch knowing how our audience feels, thinks and behaves. This helps us come up with great campaigns that really resonate with our audience.

I spend the evening playing five-a-side football with a bunch of other over-40s, huffing and puffing round the pitch trying in vain to recreate my former glory days. 

Tuesday

Still aching from the night before, this is an early start with a morning of interviews as we continue to invest in the growth of the Invention team, in particular audience insight and planning.

I lunch with Dino Lamptey-Myers, head of strategy, and Liam Mullins, head of trading, from the7Stars. It's a meeting to discuss ways we can work effectively together in the future.

Rather than reacting to client briefs, we're looking proactively at brand partnerships that can engage with Trinity Mirror's audience in a new way.

After lunch it's on to another client meeting, this time helping with media delivery for a brand (top secret at this stage) that is keen to use our knowledge of local communities and businesses to help target key areas.

I watch a bit of the Champions League in the evening – it will be interesting to see how that changes next year as the rights have been bought by BT Sport.

We're actually working on a pitch for BT at the moment to help make people aware of this, so it’s very much front of mind for us.

Wednesday

We hold our monthly all-staff meeting where the senior leadership team gives an update on the business to the sales floor. I also lead our Excellence Awards, an opportunity to recognise the great work going on internally.

The awards don't just focus on the big deals that have been signed but also on the unsung heroes behind the scenes that our customers don't necessarily get to meet.

Without their innovation we wouldn’t be able to do what we do, and this month the winners are the team that built the new Trinity Mirror Solutions website.

Lunch is with The Daily Mirror's weekday editor, Peter Willis. As the events division of our business reports into me, we're discussing and planning this year's Pride of Britain awards – the biggest event of the year for us, which is sponsored by Lidl.

This year's event takes place in September and will be a great example of collaboration between Trinity Mirror's editorial and commercial divisions as we look to make it another roaring success.

Later I meet with Sam Cope, one of our creative editorial directors, to run through all the materials for a big pitch to Boots coming up on Friday.

We aim to delight every customer we work with, so Sam and I spend time ensuring the ideas we plan to present are as strong as possible.

Three mates and I manage two under-sevens teams for Colebrook Royals FC, based in Chigwell near my home.

Tonight is our AGM and a chance to discuss the squad and player development, though despite our best efforts it ends up as a glorified trip to the pub followed by a curry. Not sure Roy Hodgson would approve.

Thursday

We hold more interviews this morning and then it is all hands on deck as we're given a brief with a really quick turnaround.

I meet Justin Barnes, trading director at Team Red – WPP's dedicated Vodafone team – over lunch. We're talking to Vodafone about how we, along with the agency, can work together above and beyond traditional press advertising and begin to incorporate events and experiential.

Speaking to the editorial team in the afternoon, the General Election is the topic on everyone’s lips. As a Labour-supporting brand at The Daily Mirror, it's interesting to see Ed Miliband doing quite well in recent weeks.

He seems to have had a bit more positive press. It's a great place to be as the only popular newsbrand in support of the major opposition – there's a high likelihood of a hung parliament again, so we're campaigning to convince people that every single vote counts.

Friday

This is a big day. Not only do we have the Boots pitch but it is also my son Jake’s fourth birthday.

I'm up at 5.30am and there are new Lego bricks everywhere. Humming "everything is awesome" I get the train from St Pancras to Beeston, on which we bump into the guys from the Telegraph, who it turns out are pitching against us.

They're a good bunch and we've been working together on a campaign for a nationwide smart meter roll-out with Smart Energy, so I'm sure we'll see them again soon.

The Boots pitch is a collaborative effort with OMD and it is great to pull all our resources together. We've all got our fingers crossed and should hear back this week.

On the way home I get a text to say we've won the First Great Western pitch, which is being run out of our Manchester office.

Today also sees the launch of the Apple Watch, which is something we’ll be monitoring closely. Everything Apple creates has huge desirability, especially for Modal Britain, (the name we give to our audience, the new mass market), so we're obviously looking at how that will interact with iPads, iPhones and other Apple products.

Most importantly though, I am back home in time for a slice of SpongeBob Squarepants birthday cake and to help build another Lego set.

The lowdown

Age: 45 (going on 25)
Favourite media: It is genuinely the Daily Mirror. I'm really proud to work here. It was the newspaper of choice in my household growing up. I've even got a photo of me wearing a Liverpool FC shirt and reading the Mirror at about 11 years old.
Biggest inspiration: My two boys are what get me going in the morning. Their positivity and outlook on life is something we can all learn from. If there was one person more than any other that showed me how creative, collaborative, interesting and exciting this industry can be, it was Paul Mukherjee, who I worked with at Mindshare. Great brain, inquisitive and crackers.
Dream job: I'm in it.
One thing not a lot of people know about me: I used to be a graffiti artist, way, way back in the late eighties, with a mate of mine called Damian Harris.

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