Article
| Eleanor Dubédat 
In November, we released our 5th B2B Spotlight interview! Talking to Raja Saleem-Javaid, IT Director at Rolls-Royce, we discussed innovation and strategy in the business, the benefits of digital transformation and how they deliver cutting-edge technologies and competitive solutions to their customers.
At the start of the month, we attended the annual B2BOnline Europe conference in Barcelona. As well as presenting itself as a great networking opportunity within the Manufacturing and Distribution industries, we were there to run a workshop demystifying the business world’s most common terms: ‘Iteration, Innovation, Disruption’. The workshop itself gave some practical insight on how to run design sprints and different ways of approaching innovation within the B2B realm.
With the aim of standing out from a crowded market and challenging ourselves creatively in a short time-frame, we built ‘Pixel, the 80s chatbot’. Pixel was powered by floppy disks, which we distributed around the conference centre to bring along to our stall and upgrade… Except there was a huge twist! Find out all about it here 🤖🤖🤖
Overall, it was a big success and we already can’t wait for next year’s conference!
A team of Freestylers headed up to Manchester to deliver a two-day workshop for a new and exciting client. After the session, we received this lovely feedback that we really couldn't help but share with you “… The team were full of energy, very engaging, clearly capable and quite simply a lovely bunch of people to work with.”
And that's how we do it! 👏
Marketing Manager, Jules, took one for the team and represented Freestyle on a panel at Warwick Business School as part of their Marketing Insight Series. The series of events comprise of sessions that intend to ‘bridge the gap between academia and industry' and take place at The University of Warwick. Jules was part of a panel that was designed to give students an appreciation of the role technology plays in modern marketing, and further answer questions related to the industry.
Head of People and Culture, Emma, attended the Agency Hackers Dream Team event in London. Within the cosy and intimate setting, they discussed the rise of the 4 day week, the importance of productivity and how to maximise it, mental health at work and much more! It sounded like an insightful event, all about company culture within the agency landscape, and how to best profit from it.
Kay Edwin made it on the list of top 100 business developers in the UK! Our lovely Client Services Director was shortlisted to be on the 2019 BD100 list, who recognise the best in the business and their outstanding contributions. Great work Kay! Check out the awards list here.
We're so proud of Becki, our Head of Data and Insight, who has been shortlisted for the Young Tech Talent category in the West Midlands Tech Awards as well as the TechWomen100 Awards! You can read Becki’s impressive entry and also vote for her by clicking here.
We’re so pleased to announce that Charlotte and Claudia have both completed their DPM (Digital Project Manager) courses. Not only did they have to manage it alongside their everyday workloads, they also went and did brilliantly! Congratulations to you two 👏
More Steal a Day’s took place outside of the office in November, so here’s a quick roundup of this month’s top picks:
Claudia spent the day immersed in the cultural scene down in London town. She began by visiting the Wellcome Collection - a museum and library that explores the "ideas about the connections between medicine, life and art". Next stop was lunch in Borough Market, before heading to the Tate Modern to explore Olafur Eliasson’s In Real Life exhibition. Eliasson’s work focuses on the nature of perception, with displays that include water, light and mist. Her highlight from the day was definitely Din blinde passager (Your Blind Passenger) which involved walking down a long corridor full of dense, coloured fog. Disorienting and amazing at the same time! 👩🎨🎨
Sarah also hit the hustling and bustling capital to get cultural. She visited 24/7 – a wake-up call for our non-stop world exhibition at Somerset House . The exhibition explores the non-stop nature of modern life with many people working more intensively, juggling too many things, blurring our public and private lives, pushing the limits of our natural rhythms of sleep and waking. The exhibition contains 50 multi-sensory multi-disciplinary works that promise to provoke and entertain. In the ever-increasing ‘always on’ world that we’re living in, she was really interested to understand the varying impact this has on us and perhaps review her own habits as a result! 📲
Jake joined the National Achievers Congress in Birmingham alongside a few thousand other marketeers, gathered for two days of networking and thought leadership on all things marketing. The event focused on what we could be doing now to spot future trends and patterns within the industry. There was an overwhelming message that the social media golden age is not over, and as saturated as it may seem, there is still value in using social media to market products and services. All in all, it was an interesting event with plenty of ambitious professionals to network and learn from (once you dig past the apparent self-promotion). 💼 📈
Claire and Sarah M. went oop North for their Steal a Day, to The State of Us exhibition at The Lowry, Manchester. It explores the grotesque to the beautiful, with 9 contemporary artists experimenting with technology to transform, manipulate, reinvent and reshape how we see our bodies and understand ourselves. Through time, natural evolution has shaped the world we live in, and the human species, but now human intervention is overriding natural laws of selection. Mary Shelley wrote in Frankenstein that the body is a ‘workshop of filthy creation’ and never has this been truer in the digital age! Plus, they both had their portraits drawn by a robot 🤖 And as an added bonus, it only rained a little bit… ☔️
Our Meet the Team page has been up and running for some time now, so if you haven’t already seen it, then what are you waiting for? If you’d like to find out what constitutes a dream team and learn a bit more about everyone’s personalities, then check it out here 👱🏻♀️👩🏻🦰🧔🏻👨🏼🦲
November's Sheepies winner is none other than… Jules! 🤩🎉 Consistently demonstrating some of Freestyle’s most esteemed values, being those of ‘Creating success’ and ‘Inspiring someone’, our Marketing Manager, Jules, has gone above and beyond in her work, impacting all areas of the business. From helping to organise the Barcelona conference ins and outs, setting up B2B Spotlights and Tonic events, all the way up to delivering a stunning & pitch-winning demo - her energy and awesomeness really shines through in everything that she does! Very well done to you, Jules🏅
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