David Slade

Employer: Shine Communications
Degree: BSc psychology
University: Cardiff University

Starting out

I did some work experience with an advertising agency and spoke to people working in PR before getting my job. I also sent out lots of speculative CVs and asked for feedback. This helped when it came to applying for my current role.

My job

Each day starts with a newspaper meeting. Everyone gathers to talk about what’s in the papers that morning and to look for news stories that could be relevant to our clients or our competitors. Reading the papers also helps us keep on top of consumer trends and new media developments that we can reflect in our clients’ campaigns.

Depending on which campaign I’m working on, I could spend time writing press releases, helping devise PR plans, or organising or attending events. I’ll also go to meetings with my team to discuss the work we’re doing. Each month we meet with clients to report on their campaigns, so it’s important to keep track of how they’re going – for example, I keep in touch with journalists to make sure they’re covering our clients’ messages and check the papers to see if clients are featured. In fact, as I’m in a junior role I’m considered to be the ‘media hound’ so checking the papers for coverage is an important part of my job.

Everyone’s very relaxed and we have a lot of fun in the office: there’s a creative area where we can go to get away from the working environment for a while and just sit and read magazines or play table football.

An ever-changing profession

PR tends to be a fairly ‘liquid’ industry – instead of working on finite projects or tasks, work constantly evolves depending on the news agenda. Working with creative people is never dull: one of my biggest achievements so far has been to get a model of Shrek into Madame Tussauds – not something I ever thought I’d find myself doing! It was great to get positive feedback from both colleagues and clients.