Business Development Manager
WPP

Victoria P

0.00.03 My name is Victoria P, and I am a business development manager at WPP. My role has two different aspects primarily. One is more conventional in a marketing sense. I work on a global team, which looks after one of the largest advertisers and marketers in the world. That work goes across many different marketing disciplines from advertising and public relations, through to product design, media, and all sort of different types of market research.

00.00.32 The other aspect of my job is more to do with the strategic direction of WPP. It is fascinating to be able to see how the different things we can do in terms of looking at brands or communicating to people about them, can be applied across all different sorts of problems. And that is really, really exciting to work on. I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do when I was at school. I knew that I was interested in a broad sense in the communications industry.

00.01.01 I was really, really obsessed with magazines and books and newspapers and current affairs, and I thought that I maybe was interested in being a journalist, but then I ended up getting a job at Sky, where I launched, or worked on the team that launched new TV channels. My boss actually, a fantastic lady, a really nice woman, encouraged me to apply for a few graduate training schemes, one of which was the one that WPP has, called the Fellowship, which somehow or other I managed to get onto, I’m still not quite sure how.

00.01.33 My first time in an ad agency was when I was 15 and I had just finished my GCSE’s. I spent the entire week working on cat food brands, which I have no interest in at all and I don’t even like cats either which sort of put me at a slight disadvantage. It really did make me think that it was very sophisticated the thinking that went into why a different product had packaging in a certain way.

00.02.00 And so that really gave me, I suppose in the back of my mind, an interest in advertising, which I didn’t really follow up until I after I had left university, but it was there as something I thought was quite exciting and that I maybe would return to at some point in time. I’m the first person in my family to go to university. My father left school I think, he will probably tell me off on this, I think he was 15, and doesn’t really have that many formal qualifications, and my mother also left school when she was quite young and she trained to be a dress designer.

00.02.32 So quite a sort of vocational skill, and she worked in the fashion business before she had kids, and my father ended up working up working in the car business, he was a car dealer. They were always quite enthusiastic about encouraging us as kids to try hard at school, and not just in school in a conventional academic sense, but to embrace different passions for the arts or sport or whatever it is that we were interested in.

00.03.02 The job that I got at Sky, I got because I was walking my dog one night, and a police car was outside a house and a burglar alarm was going off, and a lady had been burgled. And we lived just around the corner, so I stopped and checked whether everything was all right, and I just happened to start talking to one of the people that lived in the house who eventually became my boss. You really could never plan that kind of interaction, and it is really an awful thing that happened, that her house was burgled and her car got stolen and that is the most bizarre way I have ever heard of anyone getting a job.

00.03.39 I really enjoy working with really entrepreneurial people, people who started their own companies or who maybe work within a large organization but still view it with quite an entrepreneurial view of the world and how you can go about driving business forward. At some point I would like to run something which may be as a global piece of business or an interesting project of some kind, that is really what I would like to do.