Kenny is a senior member of the MediaCom North team, leading the UK Google Practice – as well as being an accomplished abstract artist.
Until March he was the agency’s Head of Digital, leading on the full digital strategy for MediaCom North, before the launch of the UK Google Practice. The 250-strong team of specialists is based at MediaCom North and provides services for clients across the Google ecosystem.
Skelton is an experienced digital professional, and prior to MediaCom was Digital, CRM and Insight Director for pub chain Greene King. He’s also an abstract artist, creating conceptual pieces filled with emotion, light and dark.
We found out how a week in his working life looked…
Monday
Monday starts at 5:30am in the countryside – no rest for the wicked!
The sunlight comes beaming through the window and the birds kick off their usual morning choir. It’s time to head downstairs, grab the coffee beans and grind them, before making the strongest coffee I can muster.
It’s days like this I really miss our wonderful office barista Chris – the sound of the grinder at home is nowhere near a match for his chat and the background noise of Stone Roses classics.
Coffee in hand, I head out to feed Flossy the chicken, a beautiful and sassy Blue Orpington. She’s 10 years old, which for a chicken is pretty epic.
Mondays kick off with a stand-up with the Google Practice MDs, Nicola Marsh and Louis Georgiou, as we work through what’s happened since Friday. We then work through what’s on the agenda for the week.
We launched the UK’s largest Google Practice around a month ago, the culmination of many months of blood, sweat and tears shed by our fantastic team. It’s a real credit to their talent that we have been able to launch something that can carry such a big label.
Things have taken off just as we’d hoped and, as a result, we have a lot to work through this week. Fortunately, we have the fantastic skills of Louis to make sure we’re operating in the most agile way.
We then jump straight from our catch-up into the Google Practice leadership weekly meeting, where we hear from the Google Practice heads of product about what’s on their agenda, and how everyone needs supporting.
This afternoon we have a two-hour key client meeting where we’ve been bringing to life our growth plans for the year. These sessions have changed in recent years from talking about media planning to talking about first-party data, data and tech consultancy, and machine learning.
Where we used to have media planners, we now also have data activation consultants, ML engineers, data scientists and CRO strategists. It makes me realise how things continue to change in the media space; while it may be more complex, it’s also way more exciting.
Meeting finished and it’s time to log off and have some dinner before I grab some time in the studio.
I’m a man of many hobbies and one of my real passions is abstract art. Having never been remotely creative, I decided last year to give it a go, and have never looked back.
Tuesday
Fitness is a big part of my life; whether that’s running, cycling, strength training or swimming. Today’s is PT with my trainer James – he takes great satisfaction in me arriving ten minutes late by making me do a rather unpleasant round of squats and burpees.
Then it’s back home and time to do business… coffee in hand I’ll jump into the office and crack on with my day.
I have a quick 8:30am meeting with our Media Engineering partner Lisa Mundy, who is currently in the process of bringing our UK media engineering teams together into a single team.
9am and we’re straight into a pitch prep session. Having only worked agency-side for three years after working client-side, I’m always amazed by how intense the pitch process is. I’ve blocked out the entire day to work on it with the teams.
It’s a crazy rollercoaster that comes careering through your week; it brings with it equal measures of excitement and fear. The best part for me is the sense of camaraderie that you and the team working on the pitch have.
Today I’ll be working with Head of Product Ryan McKay and our two talented PPC leads, Claudia Ziegenbein and James Balmforth. The four of us connect on Teams and dig in for the long haul. We know it’s going to be a late one, but we don’t care because we’re a team – and everyone gets a Deliveroo voucher so no cooking tonight.
While James and Claudia set about creating the progressive search strategy, Ryan and I discuss how we want to bring it to life. This is crucial as in a world of high tech and machine learning it’s easy to bamboozle people, and for me that’s not how you help clients grasp concepts.
Working through dinner and into the evening we go backwards and forwards, discussing the strategy, reviewing the structure, diving into the ML story, and identifying the challenges we might encounter.
As much as it’s tiring, I’ve loved every minute of today. I sit with a cup of sleepy tea beaming with pride at just how talented the team I get to work with is.
