Be Your Future

Hi guys,

It’s been quite a while since my last blog which only goes to show how much my workload has picked up over the last couple of months. As a reminder my role is Partner Engagement Coordinator, and my small team works under Global Agencies and Accounts, and the aim of our team is to facilitate our Agency Directors to build a strong relationship with different stakeholders at our agencies. On a day-to-day basis this means a LOT of meetings, syncing on how we can help each individual Global Agency Director (GAD) improve our relationship with our Agencies, running different education sessions and workshops for these agencies, and normally planning some sort of upcoming event.

For me working on a large-scale event is the most exciting part of my job. You get to work with numerous different stake-holders to ensure our presence at the event is better than previous, better than our competitors, and really depicts Microsoft’s Advertising’s story, making us more appealing to any clients who may attend. Plus there’s nothing more rewarding that seeing all your early mornings, late nights and hard work pay off on the day.

Over the past three months we’ve been planning for our biggest event of the year; Cannes Advertising Festival. If you can imagine thousands of people and hundreds of the most innovative companies taking over a beautiful beach in the south of France; that’s Cannes Advertising Festival. The event isn’t until the end of June (my second last week at Microsoft), and we’ve been intensively planning since January which just goes to show the scale of this event. I’ve been hard at work managing our budget, understanding what engagements (dinners, excursions etc) each of the Global Agency Directors want to do with their clients, assisting in managing the schedule for different Tours we will be doing, along with my main responsibility of outlining an engagement programme for the 14 clients we will be hosting out there- essentially I was given a budget and asked to organize the best most exclusive dinners, lunches, and boat trips possible within my allowance, along with a number of logistical things such as registering clients, hotel allocation, and flights. Having done all this I then found out a couple of weeks back I would be attending to ensure all our activations run smoothly! I can already guarantee this week in Cannes will be the highlight of my placement- my only concern is needing a new wardrobe… is there such thing as beach-work wear?!

Anyway, Cannes is set to top off what has been an incredible year which I will be so sad to walk away from. In 2 and a half months my year is up and the teams new intern will be sitting at my desk. I’ve had such a great experience at Microsoft and already I feel like even if I never return to work for the company, I’ve learnt so much, had so many doors opened for me and I know so much more definitively the direction in which I want to take my career. I’m not saying it hasn’t been hard work because it has been, but it has certainly paid off!

TTFN
Nicole