Jenna Livesey is business director at Dentsu Creative, a global creative agency within the Dentsu International Network.
With strategic locations in Manchester, Edinburgh and London, Dentsu Creative works with brands such as Valspar, Ronseal, Hilton Hotels, Halfords and Oreo.
With over 15 years of agency experience, Livesey has worked on global and national household brands such as Coca-Cola, Heinz, Ferrero, Kimberly-Clark, Arla, and Brown Forman. After starting out in London, she moved back to Manchester almost seven years years ago where she lives with her husband and three children.
At Dentsu Creative’s Manchester location at Bonded Warehouse, she shares a recent week in her life…
Monday
A usual 6am start. As it’s Monday I get the tram and head into the office. We’re based in Bonded Warehouse just behind the Science and Industry Museum. It’s a relatively new space for us and we’re loving it here – lots of exposed brick, a prerequisite for any Northern agency! The first meeting of the day is the 10am weekly agency huddle where we run through the WIP and discuss the project priorities for the week. It’s good to kick start the week face-to-face with the team and catch up on everyone’s weekends.
We’re in the thick of launching a national campaign for one of our clients, so the days are filled with various internal and client meetings. Today included lots of calls with our creative director based in Edinburgh. We go over some of the self-tapes to finalise casting in time for the PPM later in the week.
Dentsu Creative is fairly unique in its setup; we are run as one business, meaning clients and work cover all offices. There is no ‘regional’ thinking – the right people and teams are matched to the right work.
We have a business leadership meeting in the afternoon. This is a UK-wide session led by the ELT. We’re looking at improving some of our processes so the leadership team from across the UK locations can get together to get up to speed. As one of the business directors for Manchester, I will support the full company rollout over the coming weeks.
In between these meetings, I have various catch-ups on the new campaign with our production team, media agency and PR team. It’s a full Dentsu suite on this one so we’re in regular contact to ensure full alignment as we head into launch.
Tuesday
Tuesday is our other in-office day. I tend to get in around 9.15 as I drop the older two kids at school first. I grab a coffee from the café downstairs on my way up. An exciting opportunity for one of my clients came in from ITV overnight and I’ve set up a team regroup for 9.30.
At 10 am we have our Manchester weekly huddle. Here we share recent work, team or project highlights, or have various guest speakers in. Today JC Decaux shared the latest advancements in OOH. Sessions like this help keep us at the forefront of what’s possible when bringing creative ambition to life, and these sorts of sessions always go down well.
I get a text from the client asking if we’d like to share the campaign strategy and initial concept work with their wider teams. There’s a lot of excitement behind this one so myself and the creative director jump on a call and present the campaign end to end to their European colleagues.
Over lunch, a group of us walk over to Spinningfields to grab some lunch and sit together. It’s nice to grab these ‘non-work related’ moments to hear about what everyone is doing – we mostly discuss pets, kids, food – and what everyone is binge-watching on Netflix…
Tuesday tends to be a big finance day. I spend most of the afternoon with my head in Excel and other reporting tools. I dash home and spend some time with the kids before bedtime. Once the smaller two are down I head out for my late Reformer Pilates class – a weekly ritual I couldn’t do without.
Wednesday
I work from home on Wednesdays so a slower start to the day. During at-home days I can often squeeze in some form of exercise, and I take a longer route to school with the kids for a bit of fresh air.
After a full team stand-up to chat through the various workstreams, I catch up with the MD on a recent client request to investigate market expansion for one of their products. I kick-start the process with our global teams so that we can build out an approach. I have a degree in languages and European Business, so this sort of brief is right up my street.
I work with our marketing director on a press release for the campaign, then jump straight into a pre-production meeting (PPM) for another one of our campaigns going live. The director shares his vision for the ad, as well as location suggestions, proposed casting, and music. This is one of my favourite parts of the job as everything that has previously lived on paper or within agency walls now starts to come to life.
At the end of the day, I review an effectiveness presentation summarising the progress of one of our ongoing campaigns. Our primary goal is to create impactful work, so I engage in discussions with different internal teams to determine the benchmarks we want to set.
Thursday
As an exception, I head into the office on Thursday for our agency-wide Dentsu Seicho event. The whole of Dentsu Manchester headed to Factory International for the morning to hear our UK CEO Angela Tangas present 2024’s objectives to us. We also hear from our DE&I leaders on how Dentsu approaches DE&I as a business and how best to engage clients in these conversations. Two of my other colleagues discuss how AI is transforming the way we do business and share Dentsu’s credentials and innovation in this space. The morning is closed by Olympian Mark Foster who talks to us about resilience in harder times, something we all need at the moment.
I stay for the afternoon too as my clients are joining for the client-focused session. We all stay for a few drinks and end the evening with some dinner together.
Friday
I don’t work on Fridays. When I’m in work, I’m very much in ‘work mode’ and this applies to when I’m ‘home’ too. I unplug and give my full focus to the family, ready to go again on Monday.
