Hire Wrong Melanie Myers By Melanie Myers
How did you get started in advertising? Like many advertising professionals at Wieden+Kennedy (W+K), by accident. After college, my versatile journalism degree and I moved from Texas to Seattle for obvious reasons. I worked at Microsoft on innovative CD-ROM packages, like the now-defunct Encarta, which led me to a job archiving historical images at the Corbis licensing agency. I later moved to Portland and stumbled into a job I was totally unqualified for at a local prepress service bureau. There, I met W+K. I loved working with them and decided they were my people—that’s where I wanted to work, regardless of the job.
My first interview with W+K was in IT, as I had an obsession with technology and a knack for figuring out computers. But I landed my first job at W+K as an assistant to the creative directors on the Microsoft account and quickly moved into recruiting and creative management, where I worked for eleven years. I left for three years to start my own company, which was an amazing experience, but was seduced back by Dan Wieden six years ago to work in a global capacity, implementing recruiting strategy across all of W+K’s eight offices.
What kinds of changes did you observe rejoining W+K? The media landscape has changed things dramatically for both W+K and the advertising industry. Information is everywhere. We communicate with people in incredibly different ways and have many more opportunities for multitasking: we eat during a work meeting while we read our emails, take photos of things to post on social media while we text our friend in the other room and answer a call from our boss who’s in China because it’s the only time she can talk. Studies show multitasking is actually bad for us because we get less productive and our ability to filter out irrelevant information declines. It’s a fire hose of information shooting at us from all angles, not to mention an often intense fear of missing out—so much so that phenomena like Pokémon GO happen overnight.
For our clients, everything has been accelerated. Today’s generation of data, production of content and social networks accelerate the flow of all this information, so it’s overwhelming for people and increasingly difficult for marketers to cut through a faster and faster moving window of opportunity to get people’s attention.
It’s also never been more difficult to get away. (continue)