A day aboard The Bigger Boat

Recently we welcomed Abigail, a final year advertising and marketing student, aboard The Bigger Boat for a day. With a passion for communications, we were more than happy to give her a taste of agency life. Here, Abbie discusses what it was like to help organise the crew and to discover where she wants to set sail next.

In 2019, I started my degree in graphic design at the University of Huddersfield. After some very stressful A-levels, being in a school of art allowed me to be creative and taught me to think about things visually. After a year, I realised that while I loved being creative, I really missed ‘correct’ answers and textbooks – so I looked further afield and found marketing! It seemed like the perfect marriage between a creative approach and business acumen.

Within a week of starting my new course, I’d already fallen in love – and haven’t really stopped falling ever since. Throughout my course, I’ve completed several placements doing in-house marketing, mainly for small businesses. These placements fostered my love of developing effective marketing solutions that connect and engage people to brands. 

During the final months of my degree, I’d begun looking to the horizon. There was a wide range of roles I loved, but I had no idea what the job titles would be. Organiser? Connector? Communicator? Problem solver? When my friend Enya (a digital marketing intern at The Bigger Boat) pointed out that I’d make a great account manager, we realised it would be helpful for me to come to work with her. A few months later, here we are!

Last week, I spent the day at The Bigger Boat shadowing account manager Izzy and the rest of the account management team, helping with tasks around the ship. During my day, I created client briefing sheets, cross-referenced report contents, learned all about Storyblok and even got to translate some blog content into Spanish (we’ll pretend I did that without Google Translate). 

Overall, I spent the day populating, colour coding and organising to help the account managers and make everyone’s jobs a little easier. I also learned what it takes to organise a crew across all of the different departments and what that really looks like in the industry. This helped me contextualise what I do and what I love, showing me how valuable those skills can be when it comes to not only working together as a team, but helping a client get the best results. 
From just one day at The Bigger Boat, I learned I have a love for agency life; the nature of both the environment and the job was something I could see myself thrive in. In a few short months, I’m set to graduate from the University of Huddersfield and, with my newfound experience, I’m planning to set sail for a position in account management. Perhaps one day, I can come ashore to The Bigger Boat office again.