A day in the life of Account Director... Rosie Lumley

7am: The alarm goes off, I jump out of bed and cycle over to my local swimming reservoir in Hackney to start the day right. It’s sunny and the water does just the trick. I dry off and head back to my flat to get ready for the day ahead. 

8.30am: I switch my laptop on, sipping coffee and catch up on emails, Discord notifications and dig through PR planner docs. Discord, the gamer’s choice among IM platforms, has become one of the key ways we communicate with each other in the agency and it gives our clients a quicker comms portal to reach us on. Particularly good in the fast-moving world of agency-side PR! I click off the chat and note down the day’s to-do, before getting lost in a Discord debate.

9-10am: Time for the Raptors to assemble! Or rather, it’s our agency-wide weekly meeting. There’s 6 of us who all work remotely so it’s important to start the week off with a detailed client-by-client update across all the accounts. Together we celebrate successes (coverage woohoo!), troubleshoot any issues and strategise for the week ahead. But most of all, it gives everyone a chance to have oversight on what’s going on within each account. 

11am-1pm: The next few hours are a blur of pitching, writing, researching and responding/consulting clients with queries as and when they emerge. We have a couple of new-ish Raptors who we’re busily training up, but who are also teaching us a thing or two. Gotta love Gen Z! 

1pm: I wolf down some larder leftovers (I don’t really have a larder obviously) and walk a few paces of my small flat, before getting back to business. 

1.30pm-4pm: Although we specialise in gaming, web3 and media, sometimes the job takes us into weird and wonderful niches. Today, it’s the world of pet tech. My colleague and I spend the next few hours researching, writing angles to pitch and building our media list ahead of pitching these out to press. Lots of very silly dog puns are flying around and it’s great fun. I take a paws to check in on the client Discord servers and grab a coffee while mulling over some byline ideas. After that, I get back on it. Reviewing a client’s interview draft, updating trackers and chasing up pitches for another client. 

4pm-6pm ish: Next up, I have a client meeting. We run through the results from the last week, what we’re working on next and get updates from their side. It’s a good time to take stock of the last week and re-strategise for the upcoming one. The rest of the working day is spent recapping work from earlier in the day, sending notes from meetings, catching up on the progress of pitches and sharing coverage that’s gone live while I was in meetings.

7pm: And while it may be down tools for the working day, it’s not the case for my amateur sporting career. I head off to my 5aside match - a highlight of the week. If there’s one thing PR and football have in common, it’s that communication is key. Something I remember all too well when bumping into my teammate as we both go headlong after the same ball without warning. ​