This month’s day in the life comes from our new business director, Nicole Browne, who shares what her early days in PR taught her about storytelling and how one pitch team managed to make her tear up like a proud parent.

We’d be remiss not to give ourselves a cheeky new business plug here. So if you read this and think that MI Media sounds like an agency you’d like to work with to grow your business, then get in touch at [email protected].  

What led you to a career in media?

Balancing my academic and creative sides was always my aim when trying to figure out what I wanted to do. Having studied fashion promotion at university, I realised that while I didn’t live for fashion, I enjoyed the opportunities to write and tell stories that the modules on PR offered so initially looked for jobs in this industry.

In those first few years of my career as a PR executive I had to find compelling stories in everything from abandoned shopping basket retargeting (we sent and retrieved an actual shopping basket from the edge of space), to the online deal-hunting forum HotUKDeals (one shopper filled their freezer with 300 ice creams for just £17.36 after they spotted a pricing glitch which saw ice creams going for pennies at Tesco Express). It taught me so much about how to tell stories that people want to read.

Eventually, I joined an agency that specialised in PR for the advertising & media industry. Here I worked with clients including MediaCom, Ogilvy and Leagas Delaney, before being approached by a recruiter at Omnicom Media Group UK to run its PR as part of its new business and marketing team. It was this in-house role that broadened my skills and showed me the opportunities that lay in agency new business and marketing. After a few years moving around the OMG UK network, I came over to the side of the indies at MI Media.

What does a typical day look like for you?

My role puts me in the very privileged position of being able to work with pretty much every single person in our agency. One day might see me working with a group of Business Directors to develop the conversation for an upcoming client roundtable event, another might involve working with one of our more junior team members to uncover their specialist knowledge and support them in writing an insightful article for our website.

I am by far my busiest when a new business pitch hits. One of the fantastic things about MI Media is that when this happens, everyone is all hands on deck. It’s not just about the pitch team in these moments, but about the rest of the team picking up work to support those on the pitch and make sure that no one is at risk of burning out. I love everything about a pitch; they bring the absolute best out of everyone. I feel like a proud parent when I send the team off for the final pitch presentation after weeks of research, story building and rehearsals. I was so impressed by one pitch team during their final rehearsal that they managed to make me cry, which as a ‘stoic Yorkshireman’ is quite the feat.

What mistake have you learnt the most from?

Although I’m an open and direct person, I have fallen foul of worrying too much about other people’s opinion of me. As I’ve grown into my leadership role, I’ve had to learn that there will be times when I have to be firm, either with the team or in my own convictions. Not everyone is going to react positively all the time, but their reactions aren’t a reflection of who I am. As long as I truly believe in my recommendations and actions, I’ve learnt that I need to stand by them. And honestly, I can’t think of anyone who’s held a grudge against me for any of the decisions I’ve made at work!

Who’s your role model and why?

When it comes to work, I like to pick and choose what I admire or appreciate in the people I work with and try to emulate them. However, there’s one person that stands out for me who’s been doing incredible things over the past few years: Saffana Monajed.

I first met Saffana at OMG UK where she was a Media Planner at OMG Unite. Since then, Saffana has set up WhiteBoard Marketing Co., running writing workshops that get marketing teams excited about writing for their organisations. Not content with launching an incredible business (while becoming a mother of two!), Saffana is perhaps more recognisable as a voice on social media breaking down in the simplest terms how the marketing machine works. More specifically, how the Israeli government is using well known marketing tactics to get the West to buy in to, or at least stay silent, about the genocide in Gaza. Other people trying to build their client base in an industry still dominated by white, middle class decision makers might have shied away from a topic like this. But I defy anyone to watch Saffana’s videos and not develop a better understanding of what is happening, while also learning about some genuinely great marketing tactics that can be applied to their own clients.

Beyond this, the network of women that Saffana has built around her and that I’ve had the pleasure of meeting is full of incredible people. This, I think, is the best reflection of a great role model.