Our Infectious Media ‘Pathways’ series of interviews aims to highlight the career options and opportunities available within the business. In this interview, Rosie Shimell, Head of People, speaks to Rachael Morris, about Infectious Media’s Optimisation Academy - what it is, and how it helps our people develop.
Q: What is the Infectious Media Optimisation Academy?
The IM Optimisation Academy provides a ‘hands-on’ method of learning about our core service - which is delivering excellent campaigns for our clients.
It is open to people in the business who aren’t in the optimisation teams, but want to know more - from members of our Client Services team, to our Tech team and our Finance/HR/Marketing teams. We believe it benefits everyone to know about what we do.
In terms of structure, our Academy members are assigned a campaign and then over the course of a 4 week period they work to make that campaign as much of a success as possible. They are fully supported by members of our Optimisation team, who talk them through what they should be focusing on to make that campaign perform.
At the end of the 4 weeks, they hand back the campaign to the Optimisation campaign owner, and then take part in an assessment. Half of the marks come from a one hour test, a quarter goes on the amount of effort put in by the individual (tracked via changes made to campaign) and the remaining quarter is an assessment of the performance of the campaign over the month.
Where possible we try and match participants to their own clients so that this helps their understanding of their particular accounts.
Q: How does the Optimisation Academy help the business and how does it help personal development?
It helps the business by making sure that everyone has a more in-depth understanding of what the Optimisation team do, and how our bidding technology works.
For example, at the end of the 4 weeks, an Account Manager has a much broader understanding of how the requests that they send to the Optimisation team are actually carried out. This in turn helps them understand how they should communicate requests better.
Another example might be if a Data Analyst participates - at the end of the programme, s/he will have a better understanding of which specific insights are helpful for improving campaign performance. This helps the business perform better as a whole for our clients.
On an individual basis, it gives our people a better understanding of how they fit into what we deliver as a business. And it’s open to ANYONE at Infectious Media - which supports our belief they we are all working toward one common purpose.
We also believe that the Optimisation Academy provides a rare opportunity to get hands-on experience of optimising campaigns; typically that doesn’t happen in other agencies.
We hope to provide people with a much clearer understanding of Optimisation and how it works. Finally, it adds another skill, which we believe is critical to our staff being able to build on their development pathway at Infectious Media.
Q: What have you learnt from the first round of students, who have just concluded the programme? And what advice can you give to future students?
We got some feedback from everyone and it has been really helpful and has allowed us to evolve the academy.
Going forward we’ll help by giving them more specific tasks at the beginning, but slowly allow them more autonomy as they become increasingly competent in what they are doing.
In terms of advice for participants - I’d just say you need to understand that optimising campaigns takes time! You’ll need to dedicate at least an hour a day, or this can be spread out throughout the week e.g two x 2.5 hour bursts.
Overall, we just want people to know that this is a great way of understanding how to optimise campaigns, and we really think this is a fantastic, hands-on way to learn.