Spotlight Series: Nine Weeks, Countless Lessons
Oakley Webb is a second-year university student at the University of Leeds. He has spent a 9-week internship at WK360 looking into the impact of AI on the sphere of creative marketing, through interviews, research, and studying marketing trends. His work: Ctrl+Alt+Create: Your Guide To Creative Marketing In The AI Era, will be available to download for free very soon! When Oakley leaves us, he will be embarking on a year of foreign exchange study in Paris, for which we wish him all the best!
Five things I’ve learnt as a marketing intern at WK360
1. AI is not the end
In writing Ctrl+Alt+Create I spoke to a lot of people, from marketers like me who are just starting out, to marketers who have decades of experience. This was a fantastic opportunity for me to hear from those who have seen it all before. As a 21-year-old, AI is the first industry changing technology that I’ve encountered. It’s new, it’s exciting, it’s scary and it’s going to change the way we work forever. However, as was pointed out to me, online meetings have changed the way we work, as did the internet before it, as did computers, as did typewriters, and cars, industrial machines, horses, the wheel...
AI might be new, but change isn’t. Speaking with those that have adapted and lived to tell the tale was reassuring. I’m sure many of you reading this are already coming to terms with AI, whether you think you’re at the forefront or not. Maybe some of you reading this are AI. If so, 01101000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111!
For those of you that aren’t AI, or if you’re still not convinced by it, then don’t panic. We’ve designed the perfect guide to give you the dos and the don’ts of AI. Ctrl+Alt+Create is coming very soon, make sure you’re subscribed to our blog to hear about it first!
2. Work smarter, not harder
Another element of my internship that I’m really grateful for is the opportunity it has given me to have practical experience with AI. Before starting this project, I was very cautious when it came to using AI for my own benefit. Overreliance, misinformation and a lack of prompting skill clouded my vision. But having worked with it for ideation, editing, transcription and even analysis, I feel not only more productive but also more confident in my abilities.
3. It's less about what the statistics say, more about what they don’t say
When looking at data, statistics and opinions, it can be very easy to jump to conclusions. I remember finding a statistic that said that 35% of marketers found XYZ to be helpful, which I thought was essential and a very powerful stat to include. But, as I was reminded, if 35% of people think something, that also means that 65% don’t. Similarly, if everyone is doing one thing this might not make it the best course of action. Sometimes the best way to stand out is to think outside the box and do the thing that everyone is missing.
4. Your Office doesn’t have to be “The Office”
The Office taught us all many lessons, I think the most important being that the Slough branch of Wernham Hogg wasn’t indicative of an ideal workplace. As a teenager watching The Office, the corporate world terrified me. Seas of grey, which confined workers to their cubicles, blinders on, and focused solely on themselves and their own work. But the environment at WK360 has thankfully proved me wrong.
There’s no ‘i’ in ‘successful agency' and you can’t spell ‘business’ without ‘us’ (ignore the ‘i’ in that one!). WK360 really embodies this spirit. Although my project has been fairly independent of the company’s daily creative workflow, I have been welcomed with open arms. Everyone has been incredibly kind in explaining their work to me, including me in office chat, and being interested in both my project and me. I’d like to thank everyone at WK360 for making me feel so at home and so welcome.
5. Improvise, adapt, overcome
When WK360 first came to me with the idea for this project, it really excited me. I’ve studied AI at university and couldn’t wait to complete the brief. But the more time we spent researching, interviewing and writing, the more the brief changed. This stressed me out at first, I was worrying that I was straying off task and not discovering what I was supposed to. But the WK team (particularly Jonathan) helped me see that briefs are adaptable. There’s no point sticking to a plan if you find out the plan isn’t working. Staying flexible and adaptable to whatever arises is a fantastic approach which applies to more than just marketing. In the here and now, I’m glad I listened to what was coming from the research, which not what we expected to find at first. This advice helped me keep my work adaptable and is something I’ll take forward into my career.
6. The importance of an afterwork run – bonus thought!
Marketing can be fairly sedentary work, which means that I’ve often ended up sitting a lot. As someone who loves to run, walk, hike or just move whenever and however possible, I’ve often ended the day feeling a little restless. While I’m at university this is rarely an issue. Moving from class to class, lecture to lecture (or pub to pub!) generally gets me my fix. Without my movement, I found myself going to bed at best wide awake and at worst feeling upset.
So, from very early on I learnt how important it is not to let your job consume you. As excited as I was to get going on the project, spending all my waking hours brainstorming didn’t do me any good, nor the project. I’ve found that going for a run, even just 5k, really helped my energy levels, brain power and mental health. Good to know, as I head into my final year of study and my future career.