On 13-16^th October we attended the Media Business Course in Brighton; a highly prestigious and intensive media planning immersion course which we stole based our very own Real Wold Pitching and Graduate planning training days on.

3 days of some of the most inspirational speakers in the industry (this isn’t a sales pitch, it’s what happened!) are surrounded by the task of working together in a team to answer a tough client brief and then present back a plan to extremely important and scary people in a bid to make it through to the final, and be crowned the winning team!

As the task of answering the brief was rather familiar to us as a business, we’ve picked our joint 4 favourite things about the week which surprised and delighted us –

1. Tess Alps – you would think it would be fairly obvious what you could say about the wonders of TV. But this presentation really invigorated our minds about the potential of the medium, and why it still connects so forcefully with consumers.

1. Atmosphere – 80 simultaneously wired and constantly hungover media types running around the Brighton Grand trying to complete method planning, hunting down coverage and frequency figures and desperately trying to grab 5 minutes peace. It made for the most electric atmosphere in which to merge creative minds. Probably what a pitch is like, which is a good, and scary thing!

1. Nick Hurrell – Showed us that being a success in media wasn’t about who shouts the loudest or has the flashiest car. His themes of compassion and self-assuredness in his final talk were encouraging and kind. It was the presentation equivalent of being patted on the head and sent off to the playground covered in well-done gold stars.

1. Jonathon Durden – Spoke from the heart about what the industry means to him. Inspiring and heart-warming. The fact that he also did it without a real script of powerpoint was also fantastic.

Julia’s Favourite

I think that the key experience to take away from the whole 4-day event was learning how to work alongside team mates from other areas of expertise and experience. Most teams only had one planner/media agency delegate with the rest being media owners. Therefore, it often fell to the planner to lead the process in terms of format and logical steps.  I think I had forgotten that our planning process isn’t obvious to everyone, and can take a bit of explaining to people who aren’t exposed to it every day. It was a good wake-up call therefore to work through the process with people who had never seen it before. Having to explain the process and having people question elements helped me to see our Planning process through fresh-eyes.

All of the members of our group had great creative minds (although sometimes too creative – focusing on what the TV ad would look like – grrr!), and once on board with the process all collaborated to produce the final presentation and media plan. As a planner it was hard once we had agreed on the ‘Strat Plat’ (check the lingo!) and idea not to start drawing the media plan in my head, but having the input from other disciplines helped to slow us down – fully investigating all opportunities and leading to a fully rounded plan.

Team work was also really important because you spent every waking moment in your rooms with your team when there weren’t any presentations. And every waking moment literally meant til about 2 am, so getting on was pretty crucial!

Tracy’s Favourite

I have a fairly laid-back, overly verbose, hugh-grant-“in-the-words-of-the-Partridge-family”-a-like style of presenting. So when , in our 1^st run through, my bit lasted for the full 20 minutes allocated for the total presentation, I knew I had to make a change.

In learning to distill the key and salient points, and make sure I stick to a loose-ish script, I managed to get it down to 5 minutes. Combining this, with slowing down my breathing to make sure I didn’t sound too nervous (or be sick), I sounded more confident and assured that I ever have before. This will be massively beneficial to me in the future, and was a personal highlight of mine.

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Because we were awesome, both of our teams made the final (a shout out to James Wigley, a former Mediacom-er (now media owner side) who was in the 3^rd team in the final – spot the trend?!), which was wonderful and incredibly scary at the same time.

So, to sum up, if you get the chance to go, definitely do it. You’ll be exhausted, feel like you’re on another planet, but be surrounded by enthusiastic and knowledgeable people, just as ready to share their knowledge with you as you are with them. It will be one of the most rewarding and inspiring things you’ll ever do for your day job.

P.s – Tracy would like to say thanks to Andrea Williams for helping out from afar. And Julia would like to thank Sam for his Media Multiplier and Chris K for the most mammoth Touchpoints ever!