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David Kean is the Sales Director for Europe for DAS, which is the largest division of Omnicom. For a brief explanation about who DAS are and what Omnicom is, click here - honest, it won't take longer than a couple of minutes to read.
Alongside this role, he has one of the most successful pitching records in the business and trains people on, amongst other things, presentation skills and basically how to win. And that's winning in the sense of beating everyone else by the greatest margin possible.
Anyway I spoke to him about advice for people who want to get into marketing and advertising. Enjoy.
Never Make Enemies, with David Kean
So David, what is it that you actually do?
I help companies that are client's of DAS surround themselves with as many services that can be offered by our agencies as possible.
Alongside that I work to try and improve our competitive pitch conversion and get more business out of exisiting clients. It's far more profitable to grow the business that you already have rather than try and acquire new business.
What motivates you, what makes you passionate?
I am very competitive and like to win.
What lesson, once you had learned it had the greatest impact on you?
Never make enemies - I fell out with a planner once and he ended up being my client a little while later.
What is your opinion of the graduates you see getting into the industry?
On the whole, they are a very able bunch and vastly more qualified than people of my age who got into the industry.
However I think that they get marketing confused with advertising a lot of the time.
Speaking generally, the blokes are not as mature as the girls. All of them but in particular the blokes need to realise the value in doing really thorough preparation, and what 'preparation' and 'research' really mean.
What advice would you give them?
That they have to be able to back up any assertions that they make, because people will call them on the statements they make - the key is to be graceful under pressure, don't get flustered.
Also in an interview situation, be aware that you are constantly being judged, even when the people in charge tell you you aren't. Be delightful to everyone, be supportive of everyone and remember not to be "me me me" but rather "us us us."
Rehearse your small talk - the topics you might cover, what you might say etc.
Ring the company you are applying for and ask who is going to be interviewing you, what the format will be, if other companies are presenting who they might be - you can't be too keen. Your initiative will get noted and won't come across badly at all.
As a graduate how would you differentiate yourself from the other applicants?
By not being arrogant and displaying a genuine passion and energy for the job and industry.
We don't want people who are considering management consultancy and banking as well; we want people who want to get into our industry.
Don't ever, ever be late for an interview or anything else for that matter - if you are late you might as well go home because you won't get the job.
If the format of the interview involves breaks for coffee or whatever, don't go and have a fag - stay in the room because that is your chance to shine.
Finally, what advice do you wish you had been given at the start of your career?
Keep a black book of everyone you know because when you want to start your own business that will be your bible.
Never be late. Ever.
Invest in yourself - buy some books, read some theory to back up your passion.
One book that David recommended to me at the start of my grad scheme was
How to win friends and influence people - it was written a while back but is still really relevant and well worth reading. It's not as cheesy as the title makes it out to be...
And finally, David himself has written a very good book on how to win pitches and present yourself and your ideas as well as possible - it's also well worth a read for anyone looking to get into the industry:
How not to come second - the art of winning business pitches
According to an article by the Guardian the Sun's (the most read paper in the UK) readership has fallen to its 1974 levels - it is down to 3.1 million copies a day. In fact all newspaper's circulation had either stagnated or declined.
The only newspaper to buck the trend was the FT, which showed an increase in circulation to sell 432,036 copies per day in October.
Thanks to Antony Mayfield over at Open for the info on this.
Putting the drop in newspaper circulation and therefore readership into context, by the end of the year, online ad spend is set to overtake national print spend as reported by Brand Republic earlier this year.
How do newspapers evolve to accomodate people's desire to consume information differently?
Second life is a virtual online world where you can live out your life as a 3D avatar. I have written a post about it here so check that out, but also check out this post from the blog Lunch Over IP by Bruno Giussani - there isn't a better round up of what it is anywhere else. I realised I would never be able to do it justice so have copied and pasted the entire post. Let me know what you think about Second Life?
And why is it worth reading? Well, Second Life is the newest 'thing' to hit the marketing and advertising worlds and if you know what it is, that means you can talk about it and have an opinion. If you are interested in digital advertising, you're gonna look a bit behind the times if you don't know what it is...
Second Life: the next platform
There is a media frenzy over Second Life, the synthetic world (previous posts). Wired published in its October issue a "Travel Guide" to SL and announced the opening of their SL space where "all manner of festivities, lectues and events" will take place. The Economist published a major report earlier in the month. The Observer sent embedded a reporter for a weeklong trip and devoted two full pages to it. The Swiss Sunday paper Il Caffé publishes a weekly SL column. The BBC recreates music festivals on a virtual island. CNet set up a 3D replica in SL of its office building in San Francisco and plans to have its reporters conduct interviews and host events there. 
Reuters opened a news bureau with a full-time correspondent, Adam Pasick, who moves in the virtual space as avatar Adam Reuters, featuring a press badge around his neck (image right). The Reuters SL page even charts the Linden-US$ exchange rate (the Linden is the virtual world's own currency). The list could go on.
Corporations are also there: American Apparel, Adidas, IBM, Wells Fargo, carmakers Nissan and Scion, and many others, have set up a presence in SL (mainly with the help of the same two "virtual world consultancies", Million Of Us and the Electric Sheep, who get paid real dollars to set up the virtual stuff). And the musicians: Duran Duran and rapper Talib Kweli and Suzanne Vega are among those who have played virtual gigs there. And the politicians: the former governor of Virginia, Marc Warner, who was until recently considered a potential presidential candidate (he said he wont' run), was the first to give an interview in SL. And dozens of schools: Harvard's Berkman Center offers live law classes in SL, for example. And of course blogs such as New World Notes, SecondLife Insider, Podcast.com and Business Communicators of SL "cover" Second Life with real depth (what I mean is: almost as they would cover real life).
Something, clearly, is happening there. "I'm struck by the insane seriousness of this place", writes the Observer reporter. If you're not clear where "there" is: SL is a synthetic world, a 3D online simulation where you "walk" (slower) or "teleport" (faster) around in the shape of an avatar - a computer representation of actual people, in lifelike form - and can interact (through messaging) with others, buy property and build buildings, shop, listen to music and much more. It's not a game. There are no warfighters nor "levels" to overcome. To get there, you go to secondlife.com and download a piece of software. You enter through Orientation Island, where you can get acquainted with the interface, then start roaming the world - or, if you feel you need more assistance, seek out a mentor. It's free as long as you only want to "walk" around; you have to pay to buy local currency (the Linden) or to buy land (so you can build, invite your friends over, set up a shop, or resell).
The synthetic world looks like this (the screenshot is from the Wired story, and shows only a very tiny part of SL):
And this is a very partial map of SL (the green dots are active avatars - people that are logged in; the pink stars are events; and teh green squares with a yellow dot are "telehubs"), it looks very much like a real-world map:
Yes, many people wonder "who has time for all this". But many others have the time, enjoy it, meet friends, create digital goods - clothes or jewelry for the avatars, built virtual real estate - that they then sell for real money (the Linden can be exchanged for real dollars; the Observer writes that more than 3000 residents already earn real money, and that "the richest avatar owns a property empire worth US$ 250'000 and employs 17 real-life people"; the current GDP of SL is estimated at about 600'000 US$ a day, but beware the taxman). How many are the "residents" of SL? Total population as I write stands at 1'203'213. That's however the total of all those who have signed up since the SL inception, three years ago. In reality at any given time there are just a few thousand people online (6460 right now, 499'223 that have logged in at least once in the last two months). According to Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale, the median age of the users (median meaning that half of them are above that) is 31, females account for 36% of them but for 44% of usage hours.
SL is basically a very malleable environment where residents can do (create) whatever they want. In many ways, it is increasingly shadowing the real world and starting to impact it (for a pretty amazing example, check out how the borough of Queens, NY, used SL to get advice on the redevelopment of Landing Lights Park; check out also the Democracy Island workshops; and read what doctor Peter Yellowlees, a schizophrenia expert, is doing there). And most of it is the product of the imagination and the work of its users. Because Linden Lab, the company behind it, only established some protocols and then stayed out of the way, letting the "locals" build. Robert Scoble, who looks at it from a techie perspective, says that Second Life is an operating system:
You can store files there. You can script things (there's a whole API). In fact, it's a platform. You can build a video game inside of second life. Or a music store. Or a dance studio. Or a city. Or a helicopter. Or a video screen that plays whatever content you want. Or fountain that spits blood. Or, pretty much anything you can dream up.
Including experimenting. Most of what's done now in SL is about experimenting - the BBC concerts and the CNet offices and the Scion virtual cars (and my own exploring). Not only because it still takes pretty powerful hardware to participate and the software is not perfect either: glitches and tech troubles are a fact of (second) life. I know companies that are asking themselves that very question: should we get involved? Send our people in there? Buy an island? (Current price: about 1500 US$, plus monthly maintenance fees - running the servers - of US$ 195.) The current media frenzy is interesting: SL has been a geek thing for a couple of years; now the media have discovered it, are hyping it, and businesses want a presence (it feels like when they "had" to have a website ten years ago) and as a result the number of residents is skyrocketing, and the number of SL-related press releases is growing even faster (and a PR consultancy, needless to say, has opened a SL branch, too). That doesn't detract from the potential for Second Life (or similar synthetic worlds) to become a new kind of interface to information and for interactions, to be the next platform (to use Robert's word), to develop into a 360-degrees 3D experience.