One Take with Emma Blake

👉 The Scoop – A media planner by vocation, Emma Blake found that her love of travel, combined with her ability to adapt to different countries made her a unique professional. Her travel bug extends far beyond doing “touristy things”. She lived and worked in Australia, where she worked for one of the most exciting agencies of its day –Mojo--, then New Zealand, San Francisco, London and currently in Devon.

👉 Decisive Moment #1 – While in Auckland, went with her dad to Saatchi & Saatchi (another one of the pre-eminent ad agencies of its time) as a 16-year-old onlooker and fell in love with everything about the profession.

And, after 20 years, “I still feel that energy and that thread has kept me going. So it's satisfied my travel bug. And I've been able to work in my, in the field that I love and the industry I love for so many years.”

👉 Unexpected change or event – The separation of digital and non-digital media and how the agencies didn’t do anything about it.

👉 What did she do? – At Bray Leino, her current agency in Devon, she plans media for both, digital and non-digital. There are no “digital teams” or “non-digital teams”. She is also leading the agency towards real measurement of the effect of all the media they buy on real consumers.

👉 About older workers – Older workers bring I would say 100 % soft skills. Soft skills are so underrated. How to word an email in a way that doesn't offend or incriminate a client that has done something really dumb. How to bring people in in a Teams meeting who aren't contributing or feel little bit shy. There's nothing in a CV that you can write that can capture all of those things that you learn after so many years in an industry where you deal with hundreds of thousands of different people every day. So when you're looking at an older candidate, you're looking at a person who has at some stage in their career or life dealt with a situation before. And soft skills are so difficult to teach.