Hello

 The world of TV  sounds so glamorous and it probably is for those who get to put in orders for dressing rooms filled with yellow tulips but  for those of us working as a runner sore and sweaty from carrying cooler boxes and camera gear up and down hills at Sun City, for hours, in the beating sun, you can’t help but question “what lead me to this?” and the answer came when a wonderful couple and I crossed paths and they introduced me to the world of Promo Making. It was fantastic – this is where a world of information opened up to me and the learning began, as I leapt into learning how to dissect content and retell those stories in 30 seconds. Gaining exposure to and then refining through practice, practice, practice, the art of writing, editing, shooting and then came strategy.

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There was no stopping me now, climbing the ladder from Runner to Director to Creative Director to Executive Creative Director in a variety of agencies and countries was a thrilling time. It was wonderful and very difficult - the highs were high and the lows, well low, as anyone who has been a creative in an agency will tell you. As my thirst for knowledge grew I saw the gaps and realised more and more that the “big picture” was not clear to me, it made me realise that what my brain was searching for was to understand the business of Television, so I leapt again and entered what my daughter calls, my ‘corporate era'.

 

Entering the mega-machine of Multichoice was a dream come true, engaging with people most of us can only admire from afar many of whom became my most treasured mentors and colleagues and if you were to now study the map of my CV this is where you will see a very steep incline and criss-cross  path through the business, learning about Video on Demand (it was called that then, now its Streaming), technical Project Management, licensing agreements, digital rights management and Marketing in all its shapes and sizes. What stood out for me was the diversity of clever, passionate, crazy, inspiring people who were so eager to share knowledge and help me get to where I was going, I will forever be grateful to them.   Through rubbing shoulders with these educated and talented individuals it became important to me to get a formal education so I knuckled down and earned my BBA degree, majoring in Strategic and Financial Management, then studied Digital Marketing and Design Thinking, and was fortunate enough to be sent on a Leadership and an Innovation course. Again I was shown the purpose in the choices I was making when Birthmark agency came knocking.

 

Everything came together as my career now allows me to merge what I know about being a creative with what I know about being a Marketer in my role as Chief Strategy Officer.  My role is to  research and identify opportunities, then lead and execute the agency's overall strategic plan, engaging with clients and our internal teams to develop and execute strategies. 

 

As many good stories come full circle. My journey back to art started last year when I enrolled in a weekly sculpture class.  Enter  “the artist” and person I thought I would be when leaving school and held in my heart as I traversed the globe and up the corporate ladder to avoid society’s judgement at that time of  - “oh you’re a creative" or "artist", “I can’t even draw a stick figure” hahaha.  Back in those days it always made me feel that this career choice was seen in a less favourable light, almost implying that those in conventional business roles who proudly proclaimed their inability to draw were somehow superior. But here I am both analytical business minded and well, an “emotional artist” with messy hair and clay under my fingernails.  As sculpture after sculpture was born from my finger-tips, my uniqueness became clear to me - I do business AND art, being equally as creative on a spreadsheet (ethically of course), creating strategy or laying out a campaign as I am with clay or pencils.