Wednesday 23 June
Wake up at my home near Champneys health farm in the Chilterns at 6am and wander down to the kitchen bleary-eyed for a cup of coffee and a look at the FT.com email bulletin, which gives me my window on the world. At 7am, my personal trainer turns up and talks the pants off me for the next hour - we have a debate about how the previous day’s Budget affects our respective SME businesses. I was apprehensive about the Budget, but I was pleasantly surprised by the Chancellor’s tailing off of corporation tax by a percentage every year until 2014, the change to Capital Gains tax and the fact he kicked the VAT rise into the long grass until January 2011.
I then hop on the train to Euston and walk the couple of miles to our offices on Charlotte Street, where I start the day with a meeting about the ethics of retargeting with our client the Which? Association. We choose a handful of networks to work with on our campaigns, based on their commitment to data transparency and opt-out clauses for consumers.
I spend the rest of the morning in a series of hour-long meetings with my direct reports - media director John Willacy, planning director Ian Prager, broadcast manager Nicky Legg and finance director Yin Lau - before settling down to some pitch work. We are absolutely flat-out at the moment; we have just finished the last pitch in the current round of four and we have five sets of credentials meetings in the next two weeks. Leave work by 8pm and get the train home.
Thursday 24 June
Back at work for 8.30am for more pitch preparations with one of our pitch teams. I leave them working hard at lunchtime and go to a fascinating brainstorm meeting with a charity called The Resource Alliance, which supports networks for fundraisers. I have backed the charity since 1993 when I spoke at their flagship conference in Holland, and today I meet I number of their representatives from Europe and Asia to discuss how we can bring together an integrated marketing campaign for all the assets they have to offer.
We discuss a number of different comms strategies and I walk away having promised a future-gazing piece on how the broadcast industry will look in 2020 and how that will impact charities’ fundraising in 10 years’ time.
Duck out at 5pm and hop in a cab to the Soho Hotel to meet Ian and John at the launch of the Direct Marketing Association’s inaugural Data Tracking Study, chaired by the DMA’s executive director Chris Combemale. The event runs until 8.15pm and it is absolutely fascinating so I stay for a quick drink afterwards.
Friday 25 June
Breakfast meeting in our offices with Bill Gash, who runs the UK arm of Silicon Valley start-up Ooyala, which is a really interesting video analytics business. The ability to aggregate video views on different platforms is great in terms of the localisation of media consumption - we can now think about integrating text, video and print at a postcode level.
I then take another look at the new Times website and decide this is absolutely the right strategic move for News International. Media owners can no longer have a shallow relationship with a wide group of people; they need a deep relationship with a group that feels safe giving them their personal data and trusts them to filter out the white noise on the web to bring them valuable content they need to find - I believe this is the future of a significant part of the media estate.
In the afternoon I meet Bill McCormack, chief executive of Amp - a partner agency that has an in-house team of e-commerce designers - to discuss how they will help us build offline conversion solutions for our clients. However, I make sure I am back in the office by 5pm for Friday night drinks with the team.
Weekend
Decamp to the heart of the Cotswolds with my wife and two teenage daughters for a clay pigeon contest organised by David Kyffin, global chief of direct marketing at MediaCom. There are about 70 media people with shotguns in their hands, including Arena’s Paul van Barthold and Charlie Varley, Chris Branch of Media Branch, Natmags’ Liz Kershaw and GroupM’s Steve Goodman. To my great delight, my eldest daughter Georgina wins the top prize for women.
Sunday always starts with the Sunday Times, which is like a religion - although my one criticism is I wish they could deliver the paper to me by 7.30am to save me trudging up the hill. Later, I retreat to the local pub to watch the England v Germany game but can’t bear watching beyond a few minutes of the second half.
Monday 28 June
Every week starts with a full-company meeting, and this week our graduate trainee Claire Turner presents the most recent campaign for our client the Association of Teachers and Lecturers. We also debate what we learnt from the previous week and look at the big issues and meetings for the week ahead.
At 10am I have a forecasting meeting with my finance director Yin Lau and my group heads Sue Cant, Ian Prager, Chevy Wall, Lou Dean, John Willacy and Nicky Legg, where we make sure we are properly planning our resources and can deliver on our forecasts.
I spend the afternoon preparing for the next day’s pitch for a Government client looking to influence a B2B audience - one proposal is to form a year-long media partnership with a trade body. After a last-minute internal meeting with my pitch team I head over to our partner creative agency Sapient Nitro for a second last-minute rehearsal. Then it’s back to the West End for dinner at a Greek restaurant in Fitzrovia called Vasis with Mike Prince of the Royal Mail and Dame Judith Donovan, who is on the board of the Big Lottery Fund and the Health and Safety Executive. The evening is very jolly and I drink far too much retsina considering I have a pitch at 8.30am.
Tuesday 29 June
Up early and straight into the pitch - we are the last agency to pitch and it is a two-hour marathon involving walking through the presentation followed by a one-and-a-half-hour Q&A session on the gestation of earned media and the role of straight data sets versus econometrics in evaluating campaigns. There is very good two-way interaction in the last section and the whole team acquits themselves very well.
I then have a sandwich lunch in the office with John Willacy, our senior analyst Tim Part and a potential new client from the utility sector, who has set up the meeting as a result of a conference speech I gave five weeks ago. We spend an hour debating the brief and at the end the client says he will talk to procurement and get us on the roster, so we are very pleased.
Tim, Ian and I then hop on the tube to Oval for a meeting with Chris Osborne at our client WaterAid, who has just been appointed as the charity's new digital lead. On the train home I start writing my speech as chair of the following day’s Best of Direct Mail Showcase event, hosted by the Royal Mail.
As told to Harriet Dennys
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