Using UEA English degrees in the advertising business
By: Alumni Team
Sarah Jones gained a BA in English Literature and a MA in Writing the Modern World from UEA, leaving in 2017. She has since gone on to forge a career in advertising and was kind enough to sit down with us and answer some questions.
What have you been up to since you graduated?
I started on an ad agency graduate scheme once I left UEA in 2017, with a company called Karmarama (which is now part of Accenture Interactive). I stayed there three and a half years, I then moved to M&C Saatchi World Services and worked there for another three and a half years. I’d started in Account Management (sometimes called ‘Client Management’), but while I was at M&C Saatchi I switched departments into research and insights. Now I'm at Stonehaven, a political consultancy firm, where I’m a Senior Insights Consultant. Insights is applied research – you don’t just tell companies what people think, you tell them what they can do with that information.
When I set out into advertising I had no idea they had research departments. I actually first got into insights at Karmarama because the company started getting interested in semiotics and I thought ‘I know what that is, from my degree’, so I ended up doing lots of work alongside the semioticians they hired, which worked out really well when I applied to M&C Saatchi.
What was your ambition for your career when you started at UEA? Did you have a specific career path in mind?
I wanted to do publishing because I think that's what everyone wants to do when they start out in literature! And that wasn't a bad idea. While I was at UEA I set up a publishing company called Seam Editions with some other students, and doing that was fantastic – but it made me realise that I didn't necessarily want to do it for a job. I actually got an internship at a literary agency before I left, but it just wasn’t quite what I wanted to do – so I turned to advertising as a related communications job. And then things started to come across my desk and I thought ‘Oh I’m interested in that’. For example I started working with a telecommunications client, and among it all, that got into an interesting thing about what people think the internet looks like – visually in an ad – and what role it plays and therefore how much people value it, and how much people think it should cost.
I realised I could build on that and got more and more interested in the research side of advertising, which is all about how people think about objects and services and aspects of their lives. And I realized oh, that is my thing! At UEA I was already interested in how people think about things – I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on swimming pools! – and now, in politics, I’m interested in how people think about ideas, policies. Immigration is a big one at the moment. I’m writing a slide deck on what people are talking about when they talk about immigration. But looking back I realize that this is the thread I’ve been secretly following from my undergraduate days through different corporate careers: it’s to do with how people think and see things. I wasn’t expecting to find that interest carried through into the world of work, but I can see it has been.
Tell me about your experiences studying at UEA.
I thought I was coming to UEA as an undergraduate to eventually pitch myself for the masters in Creative Writing, but ended up going in a completely different direction, and getting interested in literary criticism and theory, and doing a Master’s in that. At undergraduate level the contemporary fiction and Ulysses modules really stuck with me. The Ulysses module was hard, but it’s something I still think about. And my undergraduate dissertation was on swimming pools in contemporary fiction: someone actually asked me to read it the other day because it was still on my LinkedIn profile!
And then on the MA I got interested in creative criticism and with a couple of other students set up a company to publish creative-critical work, called Seam Editions. We applied for money from the Enterprise Centre, and they backed us! It was great – really good fun. We ran it for three years, and it was fantastic in itself, but also for jobs. I still talk about it in job interviews – people get very interested in the fact that I started something off my own bat at university. As I say, I didn’t end up going into publishing, but it got me into other jobs, and made me stand out in the graduate job search, including in my interview for the M&C Saatchi job.
In your career what key tasks and skills are involved on a day-to-day basis, and what are the most rewarding aspects?
So, what I do as a researcher is lots of surveys, focus groups and interviews, and also desk research. My job is to pull together stories and strategies out of lots and lots of information. I also do a lot of presentations, and I’m known to be quite good at it now, even though everyone also knows I’m (still) always anxious about it.
How has your degree influenced your career?
I can form data into simple, entertaining, compelling narrative pieces, and that is something I definitely learned at uni. I 100% needed the English degree to get to that. And from the literary theory work I understand perspective, and that how I see stuff isn’t necessarily how other people see stuff. Our department’s informal mantra has become ‘perception is reality’ and I think ‘oh I’m used to this way of thinking because of what I did at university’. I’ve several times put literature quotes into business writing to illustrate point of view, and that how you receive things is how it exists for you, or a character, in that moment.
What personal or professional achievement are you most proud of?
I want to say getting my Masters, 100%! But professionally it was getting into the insights department, because it’s a pretty tough jump between those departments. I had to get lots of formal training in primary research methods, but what backed it up was that I could do semiotics, which is something we learned in the first year of the BA on the Reading Texts [now Reading Now] module. Semiotics teaches you how meanings are made through codes – and that’s super important for advertising and for how you put adverts together and how people experience them. Brands will pay a lot of money to get those things right. I built my career, and managed to switch professions too, because I understood those things.
What were your experiences of Norwich as a city?
I still come back all the time. I love it. I still love visiting. When I was applying I was torn between [another excellent university] and UEA and what swung it was Norwich. Both courses were strong, both institutions are brilliant, so I just thought ‘where would I rather live?’ and obviously it was Norwich! When I come back I go to Strangers, Brick Pizza, or the Belgian Monk – I took my partner there on my last visit and she said ‘this is amazing! Why aren’t we here all time?’
Would you recommend studying at UEA? Why?
I would, and I still do! I regularly recommend it. Norwich is such a fantastic place to live, and the university is so special. It’s so different to other universities. Obviously that’s hard to appreciate when you’re picking at 18, because you’ve never been to a university, so you have no point of comparison. So it’s only in hindsight I truly appreciate how special it is. I know UEA has a thing about doing things differently but I think it’s actually true, it genuinely is. I think its approach to English Literature is really special – I don’t think many institutions do it in that sort of way, especially approaches like creative-critical writing.
Would you have any advice to give to current students wanting to follow a similar career path to you?
My genuine advice is not to panic if it's not immediately obvious what you're doing or where you’re going, or why, as long as you're following an interesting thread through. As I say, I’ve moved between departments and industries, and it led me to some really interesting places that weren’t initially apparent to me. I didn't really know, for example, that political consulting existed – or at least, if I had heard of it, at 18, or 21, or 23, I’d have thought ‘that's not for me’.
But actually, from just following my nose a bit I’ve found myself in a place that’s interesting and fulfilling too. And I never thought I would moderate focus groups - that would have been really weird to 18-year-old me! But now I really enjoy it as part of my job. So I think if you just keep following the thing that you like you will find more of the thing you like, probably in places that you don't expect. Maybe don’t immediately turn down roles you don't think fit with you. At 18 I saw myself as a very artsy, very theoretical, very liberal, and I still think of myself like that, but I wouldn’t have previously thought these jobs are compatible with that. I thought I'd have to be in a publishing house, or trying to do a PhD or like something like that. But you find these interesting things in other places as well.
What is next for you?
I think I’m staying here [at Stonehaven] for a while. I want to get really good at this!
Is there anything else you would like to tell us about yourself or your UEA experience?
I loved it. I genuinely did. I just think about it as a really good time, studying something I was really interested in.
I’d also just like to give a shoutout to whoever allocated first year accommodation in 2012. I don’t know if it was sheer luck or design but I ended up with a great group and we lived together through the whole of undergrad. 10 years on we’re still friends and actually going on holiday next month – six of us from the original flat, and now four of our partners (some who met at UEA!), a three year old, a baby and a dog.