We were delighted to welcome Lucy from Loretto Grammar School to experience what day in the life of an agency is like at The Behaviours Agency. During her time, she got to know how an agency like ours works and the different roles within the team.
Here’s how she got on in her own words…
THE BEHAVIOURS AGENCY
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF AN AGENCY
Looking in as an outsider, although small, The Behaviours Agency is a community workplace. I can see that everyone’s creativity has room to flow in this friendly environment and I was given a warm welcome as soon as I arrived. There is a prominent work ethic that goes around the room and I can tell that everyone here enjoys their jobs and they come together to work on their projects, both the accounting and creative sides of this agency.
There are many roles that I have found out about and as I spoke to everyone in the agency, I got a feel of people’s backgrounds, opinions and love for their jobs. By finding out about what they do, I got to see how the agency works and this insight showed me a side to advertising that I hadn’t even thought of before.
MY THOUGHTS AT THE START
Before I started speaking to everyone in the agency, I wrote down everything that I learnt after having a brief introduction presentation from James Ballinger:
- There are different ‘teams’ in the agency, the ‘creative’ team and the ‘accounting’ team. Both teams have a variety of different roles including; Managing Director, Senior Account Director, Account Executive, Behavioural Strategist, Designers, Creative Director and Lead Copywriter.
- The aim of the agency is to use their understanding of customer behaviour to influence their creative briefs.
- Everyone sits together and even though they are divided into a creative side of the room and an account handling side of the room, they are a close-knit group who work closely together.
- They don’t work with just one client, they have different clients who are big such as Nike and Sharps which will give variety to the work that they do from day to day.
SUE’S STATEMENT ON THE BEHAVIOURS AGENCY’S WEBSITE:
Our purpose today is the same as when we started in 2006; to understand customer behaviour in order to influence them to act. Today our approach is a little more sophisticated, using behavioural science to understand the decisions people make when they choose a brand. It means we have the privilege of helping our clients to grow their businesses by deeply understanding customer behaviour and using this to create more intelligent communication and experiences. The ultimate goal is your brand becomes the unconscious choice. Delivering this delivers commercial success. Our approach and the passion we have for human behaviour transcends customers to bring together our clients and our team alike. We call this “Uniting People” and it drives our collaborative agency culture.
FOUNDERS
Sue Benson
Sue is the Managing Director of The Behaviours Agency and Co-Founder with Dorina D’amberosio. Sue manages all aspects of running the agency, for instance, today she looked at the HR policy, sales process and marketing activity where she talked to prospective clients. She will also talk about the clients to the team, talking about what ads go on TV and what it says. She is very involved with the clients and is very interested in understanding the behaviour of customers through research which will then inform creative briefs. She loves working on client strategy so looking at the next step for the client and although the team is why she loves working at TBA, she has to look after them and they bring her problems but also solutions. One of her favourite projects was simplifying a brand down which has over 50 companies in it and it took a year! After university, she worked in M&S in the marketing side of it but didn’t like how you just worked with one client, she went into advertising and found that she was curious about people’s behaviour and 13 years ago, left a big company to have a child and then set up her own company with Dorina. She loves the variety of projects that this agency brings and loves working with the team she has.
Dorina D’amberosio
Dorina is the Creative Director at The Behaviours Agency and she focuses more on the Art Directing side of the agency. She will manage all of the visual sides of marketing from sketches of TV ads, typography and colours to the clothes on a model and furniture used in an ad. The variety of her job means that not every day is the same. Dorina finds it satisfying when products produced by the agency are seen on TV or in shops and she also talked about how amazing it is learning about different cultures with clients based in Nigeria and the differences in what is deemed ‘attractive advertising’. One of the struggles is sometimes not having enough time on briefs or when you don’t win a pitch with clients. Dorina has always loved art and that drove her to where she is today as Creative Director and at The Behaviours Agency, she loves how they are all one big family.
THE ‘CREATIVE’ TEAM
Matt Taylor
Matt is a Junior Integrated Director who got into the agency by doing an apprenticeship with them. His job means that he can do a range of projects so days aren’t repetitive. This variety is what Matt loves about his job and he likes a brief that gives him a challenge and lets him try out new things. He prefers working on illustrations with animation and finds that this agency is fun, pushes him to develop and go out of his comfort zone. He also owns a shop which he had before coming to The Behaviours Agency which I think shows his love for design.
Stuart Keates
Stu is a Creative Artworker, this means that he takes the design and goes through a technical process of making it production ready. This job allows him to learn new skills and learn how to use new bits of software with the people around him. When clients don’t know what they are after for a product, it can be difficult to make them a product and several attempts are done before the client realises what they want.
Richard Garnett
Richard is a Senior Graphic Designer who works with a range of advertising from packaging design to press ads. One of the things about his job that he loves is that you can see your work in the world and it must be a great feeling seeing the finished product. He found that working in a bigger agency, you are more departmentalised whereas in a smaller agency like The Behaviours Agency, it’s close-knit and friendly where everyone’s role in the workplace is as important as the next.
Phil Monks
Phil is the Deputy Creative Director and the Lead Copywriter. At first, I thought his role as a copywriter meant that he was doing the legal copywriting of the agency but that role actually means that he writes everything for the ads. This can be from writing TV scripts and brochures to writing on the back of packaging. One of the things Phil loves about his job is when he sees an idea come to life from a simple conversation. It can be stressful as the subjective nature of the job means that it’s hard getting around everyone’s different ideas and opinions but it can also be fun throwing different ideas around until they reach the one they will move forward. One of the things Phil said that stayed with me was that the agency are confident in you doing your job well and give you the opportunity to get on with your job but they also allow for you to ‘fly but also fail’.
The overall message that I got from them all is that the size of the agency means everything works well and the environment allows everyone to grow and let their creativity flow and it is obvious everyone gets on really well.
THE ‘ACCOUNT HANDLING’ TEAM
James Kay
James is a Senior Account Director and he looks out for new clients and oversees the team in what they do. The variety in his work from being the first point of call for clients to meetings and meeting with clients allows for him to not have a repetitive working life. Although it is annoying when a brief meets a dead end when they’ve been persuading companies and they just say no, James finds working as part of a team beneficial and nicer than being in a bigger agency where you can get lost in the background.
Greg Copeland
Greg is a Behavioural Strategist and it can be hard to get new clients so his job is to try and get them, which is an interesting challenge. He writes a weekly newsletter which shows the behavioural angle that is used in the agency to attract new business , as not many companies use it. There is a lot of variety to his work which stops repetitiveness, but you are expected to know a lot about a lot of brands so you only touch the surfaces. There are short, high intensity workshops that they do with clients which Greg prefers because they can be creative and finish a project in a short space of time instead of doing it over a longer period of time. The behavioural approach that the agency uses is different which makes the job really interesting.
James Ballinger
James is a Senior Account Director so he manages the team alongside James Kay. He is the senior point of contact for clients and also manages the marketing for The Behaviours Agency. The varied nature of his work is an advantage of the job but the products that are ‘unseen’ by the public but are an important part of a business can be annoying as you can’t see the work that you have done. One of the things that he likes is when the agency takes lead on the beginning of a brand as you own both the strategy and creative side and you see the development of the whole brand which is very rewarding. By being in a small team that punches above its weight, you can work with big clients and not just on small projects.
Mary Peel
Mary is an Account Executive and she manages clients and also the social media side of marketing. The attitude of the company and the people is positive and they have a good attitude towards the work that they produce. The agency has a lot of team building opportunities which can be lost in bigger companies. One of the things that can be a struggle is time tracking, it is a daily thing that you need to do and you track how long it takes to complete one task. The project that she enjoyed the most is creating a brochure on Housing Units. A rewarding part of her job is building relationships with clients. The small size of the team means that everything works well and the people are all down-to-earth and working towards a common goal, no matter what your job is.
WHAT I WILL TAKE FROM MY EXPERIENCE AT THE BEHAVIOURS AGENCY
I have been at The Behaviours Agency for three days on Work Experience. I came wondering what a day in the life of an agency is like, what jobs there are that make an agency work and if I’d enjoy it. These three days have been a real insight into what goes on day today in an agency. I had never properly thought about everything that goes on in advertising and marketing, but now I have a good understanding of it all.
Firstly, I now know that an agency, like The Behaviours Agency, has a variety of different clients that they help and this agency particularly focuses on researching a customer’s behaviour to help them with marketing a product so that the customer will choose their product as their default brand.
Looking at everyone’s jobs was very enjoyable because it gave me time to speak to everyone in the agency about what they do and ask any questions that I wanted about their life at The Behaviours Agency. It gave me time to see how all the jobs link and how they make the agency run. I also learnt about new jobs that I hadn’t heard of or had thought they were something else. Take Phil’s job of being Lead Copywriter, I thought that this meant that he was the head of the legal copywriting of adverts but he actually writes copies of text for advertisement including TV scripts, brochures and more. I really liked how open everyone was about their jobs and it allowed me to have a real insight into the agency.
I definitely think that this experience has opened my eyes to the possibility of going into an agency job in the future as everyone has been very friendly and welcoming, answering every question I had.
The three tasks I was given to complete over the course of three days allowed for me to experience different aspects of work life. The first task was to write this blog by speaking to everyone and it allowed me to get to know everyone and see all aspects of the agency and I have thoroughly enjoyed making this blog. The second task was to research Activate Learning which is a further education group and I found some aspects of the research hard to do but it was interesting looking at their website and picking out how they sell themselves to the public which I wouldn’t have noticed before. This task was to create a briefing document about Activate Learning which will help them prepare for an up and coming meeting. I think that this task was one of the hardest as it is difficult to pick out the right amount of information. The third task is a course on behavioural science for brands and before I did this course I had a brief idea about what behavioural science was and I found it very interesting to look at in further depth.
THOUGHTS THROUGHOUT THE DAY
Even though the agency is small and has a variety of different jobs, they all get on really well and work together. It is obvious that everyone has an important role in helping the client achieve what they want. Because of the size of the agency, it is easier for everyone to put their ideas forward for a creative brief. They also sometimes do workshops with the clients where they will have a short, high intensity period to put ideas out, get creative and bring out a product for the client. By getting a great variety of briefs, everyone can have variety in their work and not have a repetitive job. There can be briefs which are short and to the point but they can have a brief where the client doesn’t know what they want exactly so the team play around with ideas until something comes together that the client likes the sound of.
After talking to a few people, I saw that they all had a similar response when I asked them why they liked working at The Behaviours Agency, it was because of the people and the friendly and close-knit environment that the agency brings.
Everyone is given the chance to try and fail and learn from their mistakes until they succeed and I think that they all take great pride in their work and this brings a great feel to the agency.