Ali Mellon

My name is Ali Mellon. I am a marketing project manager. I am based in Devon in the United Kingdom, I work remotely, I work from home but as you can hear by my accent, I'm not from the United Kingdom. I'm from South Africa originally.

I manage projects that have to do with marketing within our company. So, as well as managing them, so kind of coordinating them from beginning to end, I also get involved with the implementation. So it's a little bit of everything.

The role of marketing is to make sales easy, so kind of the role of a marketing project manager is to coordinate projects that make selling what I do easy, what we do as a company. And what my company does is we're a global label manufacturing company, so we work with all different departments including the sales department, sustainability, research and development, innovation, technology.

We support all of these departments in taking complicated messaging and we make this messaging simpler so that it's easier to solve what our products and our services are to our customers.

A typical day for a marketing project manager involves several meetings. So there's a lot of figuring out the concepts that we need to put together and how we're gonna execute them.

So for example, if we're working on a sustainability messaging project, we'll meet with the sustainability team, make sure we understand as marketers what concept we're trying to get across to our customers. And then we'll take what is quite a complicated thing and we'll simplify it into a way that we can present it to customers so that they understand it better.

And then we'll also make it look pretty. So maybe we'll put a nice presentation together or we'll do a flyer or a PDF or something that our sales team can then send to customers and share with customers to help them to understand that section of our business.

There's a few best things about my job, so I'm gonna have to give you a list. But maybe one of the first things is that being a marketing project manager, you're not tied to one specific industry. So having the knowledge of marketing, you can kind of work in multiple different industries.

I already have, I've worked for software development companies for software as a service, I've worked for a FinTech mobile gaming company, I've worked for companies that work with government organisations, I've worked in advertising and copywriting, so you can do a little bit of everything if you have that knowledge.

I get to work on many, many different interesting projects and I get to learn things that I would never have thought about learning about. So, for example, in my role now, there's a lot of technical factory manufacturing things that I have to understand and those are things I would never have looked at before on my own.

And then one of the other best things about my job is being able to simplify complex problems and to come up with solutions for problems. So there's a lot of brainstorming, figuring out the best way forward, and then also seeing something that you've created from the beginning come to life is a really exciting part of the job.

The worst thing about being a marketing project manager is I think a general misunderstanding about what a marketing project manager does or what about what marketing does in general. So there seems to be a general feeling, especially working in a technical environment where they think marketing is really easy, it's just putting pretty pictures together, and there's obviously a lot more to it. So I think just people not really understanding how marketing fits in what the role is.

And then the second thing that I would say is the worst thing about my job, but it could also be a good thing, is having to juggle different people's ideas about what they want something to be. So you often have to work with a lot of senior people in the organisation who have different ideas about a project. And so trying to make sure that you keep everyone happy. while also maintaining your own thoughts and ideas about a project, is probably quite difficult.

I started out my career as a copywriter for advertising. So working on traditional advertising like TV adverts, billboards in the street, print magazine adverts, radio ads. I was writing the copy for adverts.

After a few years doing that I went into internal communications for a company, and that's just because of my writing background. And then I went into being the head of marketing for a company, running their marketing department and building it up and hiring people. And then at some point I just became a marketing project manager.

I started by studying a year and a half of interior design. And then I studied two years of copywriting for advertising, which gave me a diploma in copywriting.

And then when I was about five years into my career, I started part-time studying at a business school. It was called a postgraduate diploma in management and the really nice thing about this, I think that's one of the best decisions I ever made was going back to study while I was working, that you could apply a lot of the projects and the things you were learning to the work you were doing for the company I was working for at the time.

So that was a really great choice for me and I think good for my career, and I ended up with a postgraduate in business management. So that was also a little bit of everything. We did strategy, we did negotiations, we did marketing, we did marketing strategy. We did, I can't even remember all the courses now, lots of courses, organisational design. So it was kind of really a broad management overview and I think that really helped my career at the time.

I've had countless memorable moments from my career, it would be impossible to to highlight all of them. I think from my early career in advertising something that really stands out, and something I've mentioned, is seeing something from beginning to end.

We were working with quite a big electronics company. They were one of our customers and myself and my partner, who's a graphic designer, so I was the writer, they were the graphic designer, from initial briefing with this company, to production, post-production, and finally seeing it.

We had a spot on one of the biggest TV shows at the time because this company was the sponsor of the TV show. And so getting to every week, on a sitcom, see something that we had created from start to finish, it was a little 15 second ad spot at the end of every ad break during the show, that was an incredible part of my career.

I can only pick one?!

There are multiple pieces of advice but let me give you the one that I think is kind of number one is learn to fail. And that failing doesn't equal failure. The only way that you're going to actually learn and grow and improve is by failing.

So I think that that leads into more advice, which is kind of like try things even if you don't know if they're gonna work, because you can never be a hundred percent sure if something is gonna work or not.

So try things, see how they look in action, and then if something fails, it's not a failure, it just means you've learned from it and you're never gonna make that mistake again.

So yeah, I think failing, failing does not equal failure.