To make marketing an attractive and fulfilling career for young people, change needs to come from within businesses, both in terms of the way marketing is talked about internally and where companies look for new talent.

This is one of the aims of the School of Marketing, an education platform launched in partnership with Marketing Week to inform and excite school-age children about marketing and address the misconceptions about what a career in the industry might entail.

Santander CMO Keith Moor, who is among the marketers providing course content for the School of Marketing, argues that it is not only young people who default to thinking marketing is all about advertising – businesses have a habit of doing the same.

“If you look at the percentage of jobs in marketing that are about advertising, it’s a much smaller percentage than it ever has been,” he argues.

“There’s a lot of data science in there now, there’s a lot of driving business growth through brand strategy. There’s a lot of diversity, but the industry hasn’t done a good job of telling young people.”

As marketing interacts with so many other departments within a business, Microsoft commercial marketing director Helen Tupper, another contributor to the School’s modules, believes it is a great place for young people to gain a broad experience rather than specializing too soon.

“Marketing is going to give you, at the very least, a great understanding of how a company works, what it is to build and manage a brand, how a brand connects to its customers and from that you can work out what you’re great at,” she suggests.

“If you talk to young people like that and say ‘this is a really safe, nurturing, exciting place to start in’, it might appeal more.”

Marketing is not just advertising

From an agency perspective, Ogilvy UK vice-chairman Rory Sutherland believes it is crucial to get great people into brand-side marketing. He argues that the term ‘marketing’ is less interesting than the work it actually produces and when wrongly conflated with advertising it often leads young people to think they should just work in an agency.

“If there’s one thing I need in the next 20 years it’s not more great people to hire in the advertising industry, it’s more great clients,” he states. “The right kind of client is vastly more valuable [to agencies] than the right kind of colleague. Most people in advertising will admit that the very best work they produced was generally working for the right kind of client.”

A passionate advocate for marketing, Sutherland does not want the industry as a whole to suffer because young people are not armed with the right information.

“I sort of stumbled into [advertising],” he explains. “I was a classicist at university, ended up by very good fortune working at Ogilvy & Mather Direct and within about three weeks I suddenly realised marketing was an area of infinitely rewarding fascination, and I still feel that 30 years on.”

Dean and managing director of the School of Marketing, Ritchie Mehta, believes the industry should engage young people through co-creation and by showing them, through the lens of social media, that they are already part of marketing.

“We’re all a part of helping shape what the future of marketing looks like and social media is a great shorthand to say, actually, you’re contributing every time you ‘like’ something or ‘share’ something,” he explains.

I made an informed decision, because I had talked to people about what it entailed. If I had been talking to some 50-year-old duffers, that just wouldn’t have worked.

Mark Evans, Direct Line Group

This thinking is driving what the School of Marketing describes as its “customer-first” approach to learning.

Mark Evans, Direct Line Group marketing director and School of Marketing chairman, acknowledges it would be embarrassing if the programme lost sight of its young audience. Therefore, while it is great to have senior leaders as part of the rallying cry, they will be encouraged to get their junior team members involved, he says.

“If I think back to why I went into marketing, I thought I was destined for a career in finance. I took a year out and my job disappeared in a puff of smoke. Then I started talking to people who were three to five years in and found the people in finance were hating it and the people in marketing were really loving it,” Evans recalls.

“I made an informed decision, because I had talked to people about what it entailed. If I had been talking to some 50-year-old duffers, that just wouldn’t have worked.”

Recruitment evolves

Improving diversity within marketing means not just recruiting people from university.

Santander’s Moor wants people to realize what they can bring to marketing regardless of their educational background.

“We need all walks of life in there representing all different types of people; without that the industry will wither on the vine,” he says. “We recognize that we have to get more diversity, neurodiversity, socio-economic diversity. We don’t want everyone to be taught to think in the same way.”

Santander is in the process of developing a marketing apprenticeship, which Moor sees as a progressive way to build a diverse, modern workforce.

Microsoft already has a marketing apprenticeship in place, during which prospective candidates are placed in different roles across the department, alongside their formal training.

Natasha Alves, Microsoft marketing apprentice, explains she knew a little bit about marketing from a cousin who works in the industry and the sector appealed because she wanted to explore a creative career.

We need all walks of life in there representing all different types of people; without that the industry will wither on the vine.

Keith Moor, Santander

However, marketing was not talked about widely at her school and before she joined Microsoft she saw marketing and advertising as interchangeable. Alves says a lot of her friends share these same misconceptions, though they are intrigued about her role.

Since joining the apprenticeship, she wants to dig deeper and develop her overall understanding of marketing.

“At the moment, it’s understanding Microsoft’s marketing strategy, but for me I’m so excited to understand almost everything,” says Alves. “I don’t think anyone can sit there and say ‘I’m a complete marketer’, because the market changes every day. That’s why I love it so much, because as someone who is still quite young, there is so much personal development and career growth.”

With a growing coalition of marketers determined to improve diversity by taking action, change appears to be on its way.

For Santander’s Moor, the ultimate goal is to get people from diverse backgrounds into marketing by creating an infrastructure that allows them to get a foot on the ladder.

Crucially, he urges marketers to be brave in the strategies they build and the people they hire. “It’s as much about targeting businesses and getting them to open their eyes to the new skill set,” says Moor. “We need people to experiment and the School of Marketing is an attempt to try something a bit different.”

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There was once a time when small businesses would only accept cash as a means of payment, but many of those same businesses are now replacing traditional tills with contactless technology as tech-savvy consumers demand quicker and easier cashless alternatives.

Indeed cashless payments are no longer a luxury but a customer expectation.

Debit card payments leapfrogged cash as the most popular form of payment in the UK for the first time according to data published earlier this year, 12 months sooner than expected. Hardly surprising given there are now more than 100 million contactless cards in circulation.

According to industry figures from UK Finance, British consumers used their debit cards 13.2 billion times last year, up 14% from 2016, while the number of cash transactions fell by 15% to 13.1 billion during the same period. Over the next decade the number of cash payments is predicted to halve to just 6.4 billion, the equivalent of 16% of all transactions.

Amid the rise of payment apps such as Monzo and Apple Wallet, businesses – no matter what size – need to prepare for a cashless future or risk being left behind.

With churches now using contactless technology to take donations and a number of Big Issue vendors and buskers doing the same, there is no excuse for smaller businesses.

Out with the old, in with the new

Tech-savvy consumers are the future, according to Bosh McKeown, the CEO and co-founder of independent London-based coffee chain The Attendant, and he doesn’t want to be left behind.

The Attendant operates across four sites in Central London and made the transition to a cashless operation in April after analysing a number of data points and recognising the most popular demographic that was walking into its store.

“Our cash payments continued to decrease rapidly year on year, so we’ve known for a while that we wanted to go cashless, we just needed the guts to go and do it,” McKeown says.

As well as improving processes for staff, he says going cashless sets his venture apart from competitors because it has the ability to attract and retain modern day consumers who prefer the speed and efficiency of a contactless world.

But with change, comes conflict. McKeown admits he encountered a handful of customers, notably older members of the public, who argued against contactless technology, going as far as suggesting that not accepting cash payments is “against their human rights, or the law”.

Although he is quick to add this is not the case for all. “You don’t want to alienate an older generation if you’ve got a loyal customer base, but they’re the generation that argue they can’t manage their money if they’re paying on card. In their eyes they need to withdraw £100 to know they’ve spent £100 that week,” he says.

“But these days younger, tech-savvy consumers have better ways of managing their spend, like via online banking or apps such as Monzo. It’s important we remember that in years to come it won’t be that older generation that has much of an impact on businesses, it will be the younger generation who are influential.”

However, Alison Sagar, marketing director and head of consumer at PayPal UK, argues that while the younger generation is often assumed to be driving the “cashless revolution”, in reality there is little difference between age groups and how they choose to pay. She also suggests businesses should accept all forms of payment.

“Our research shows that in the next year, nine in 10 shoppers over the age of 55 are planning to shop using their smartphones, either the same amount or more than shoppers aged 16 to 24,” she says.

“The speed, ease and security of digital payments benefits everybody, regardless of their age. Our advice to businesses is clear – it’s not about committing to cash-only or cashless, but about offering as many methods of payment as possible to make life easier for customers.”

It’s important we remember that in years to come it won’t be that older generation that has much of an impact on businesses, it will be the younger generation who are influential.

Edgar Rouwenhorst, CMO of fintech firm iZettle, which aims to simplify payments for small businesses, echos Sagar’s point on accepting all forms of payment, but he does think being entirely cashless could be an issue for older customers.

“Feedback we’ve received from our merchants is that there’s a risk in alienating an older demographic who aren’t used to paying contactless. These customers might decide it’s too much of a hurdle for them,” he says.

“We definitely aren’t against cash, we tell our merchant to accept all methods of payment, whether that be paying by cash, card or with their phone.”

He acknowledges that cashless options are not for everyone and some categories, such as the charity sector, are not ready to take on a fully cashless set up compared to retailers or restaurants, though this could change.

“For now we still need to deal in cash. But with more and more shops becoming completely cashless, this could definitely change. Everything brands and businesses do regarding payments is driven by consumer behaviours and they’re changing too,” Rouwenhorst says.

Enhancing consumer experience

Rouwenhorst describes the payment component of a customer’s retail experience as the “biggest hassle”, saying the key is for businesses is to make the process “smoother” by enabling customers to pay in a seamless manner.

“The fact you don’t even have to get your wallet out of your pocket to pay anymore offers a completely different experience at the pay point,” he says. 

“But I don’t think going cashless offers a competitive advantage because for now, it’s the total experience that’s a real differentiator. It’s also about having a good product and service.”

Cashless technology does offer some additional benefits though, such as the fact certain systems can recognise returning customers so businesses can offer a more personal service.

“One of the perks is that if you pay by card some systems can actually recognise that the customer has [shopped with a store] before and therefore you can give that person a really tailored experience,” Rouwenhorst says.

“A lot of it is driven by mentality. We see other markets where the cash society is very present. Though, consumer behaviour is driven by many other things other than just having your card in your pocket.”

Uber’s seamless payment system and Amazon with its checkout free Amazon Go stores, are going further to change the way consumers purchase goods.

Sagar advises other brands to take a similar approach and focus on using cashless technology to enhance the customer’s checkout process.

“Customers increasingly want speedy, simple payments – whether they’re paying in person, online or in an app. When shopping in stores, the practicality of not having to carry cash or wait for change is an instant improvement,” Sagar says.

For McKeown, he acknowledges independent coffee stores can take longer than the chains to brew speciality coffee, so speeding up the transaction process can help cut the time a busy customer might spend in store.

“Most of our customers want their coffee quickly so if we can speed up their waiting time at the tills then this really helps their overall experience,” he says.

“For our sit-in customers, it adds the ease of being able to take payment at the table with portable card readers rather than just have to run back to the cash drawer to fetch and count change.”

The future of cash

The UK is fast becoming one of the most cashless societies in the world, but it has a long way to go to catch up with Nordic countries such as Sweden, which are leading the revolution. Barely 2% of payments in Sweden are made in cash and according to research by Capgemini that figure is expected to decline to less than half a percent by 2020.

In the UK, Wales is leading the way to a cashless society with 46% of shoppers preferring to pay by card, compared to the national average of 37%.

However, cash isn’t dead and buried just yet.

A study carried out by Censuswide, and commissioned by Square, found just 17% of British shoppers are card-only consumers, an only 38% of people describe themselves as card-first shoppers – meaning they would typically try to pay with a card first before paying cash.

Additionally half of small to medium-sized enterprises in London still don’t take card payments, perhaps surprising given small businesses are expected to grow 35% on average in the Capital during the next 12 months.

Helen Prowse, UK communications lead at Square, backs these statistics saying the company’s biggest threat isn’t other payments technologies, but cash.

“We still see cash as our biggest competitor,” she says. “In London there’s quite a strong behaviour around contactless payments, likely due to the work Transport for London has done with its payments systems. However, paying contactless is a very London-centric trend while outside of the Capital people still pay by cash.

“We know people are carrying less money but many businesses simply don’t see the need to accept card payments yet.”

The growth of the cashless economy creates many opportunities for businesses but it also raises challenges, and while cash-free payments will work for some operations they might not be right for others. As a result it comes down to understanding customers’ needs and keeping track of changes in behaviour.

“Customers are the ones driving the adoption of contactless technology. For businesses it’s about showing that you’ve listened to what your customers want, recognised that demand, and are responding,” PayPal’s Sagar concludes.

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Ava DuVernay might be the most generous director of her generation. She’s impossibly busy. Currently, she’s shooting, writing and editing her television series, Queen Sugar, which just had its Season 3 premiere late last month on OWN. Plus, she’s in preproduction for her Netflix mini-series, Central Park Five. And, oh yeah, she’s got another documentary in the works (though she’s not ready to talk about that one yet). Plus, she’s got a few other TV shows cooking—a pilot, Red Line, at CBS, and a comedy reportedly based on Colin Kaepernick’s high school years. There’s also an HBO movie, Battle of Versailles. And then, of course, she’ll helm DC Comics’ New Gods. Did we mention she’s just finished her first stint as a jury member for the Cannes Film Festival? It’s the kind of busy that would overwhelm most people, but even with her chaotic schedule DuVernay always seems to make time to prop up other creators, to inspire young minds, to say thank you and to give someone a kind word even if they haven’t been as kind to her.

It’s a Saturday in early May, and DuVernay is in New York, location scouting for Central Park Five. She’s just finished seeing a play (Kenneth Lonergan’s Lobby Hero) and that evening she’ll accept a Glaad Excellence in Media Award for intersectional advocacy. Walking back to her hotel room, as we chat on the phone, she is stopped by fans multiple times. She greets each one not with annoyance or arrogance, which could be understood given her schedule and acclaim, but with kindness. Even though she’s pulled the phone away from her face, so that she can take a moment to really listen to people’s stories, her voice carries and a “Thank you, sir” and an “Appreciate it” make it through.

Once back, she says: “What a privilege to hear people talk about your work—and that happens to me every day.”

Her generosity of spirit might come from her impeccable sense of place and time. She understands that her work—whether it’s commercials or a documentary film or even a sci-fi fantasy—has meaning beyond entertainment, whether representational or historical. While she’s scored many firsts—recently, with A Wrinkle in Time, DuVernay became the first black woman to direct a film with a $100 million budget; with her upcoming film for DC, New Gods, she’ll become the first black woman to direct a big-budget superhero film—DuVernay is more interested in the doors those firsts could open for others and the change they could bring about in the industry.

“I’m a black girl from Compton. I picked up a camera for the first time when I was 32 years old. I didn’t go to film school. I’d been a publicist for all of my 20s, I’d been working to amplify other people’s films,” says DuVernay. “In no world could I imagine doing what I’m doing now.”

Adweek caught up with DuVernay, Adweek’s Creative 100 cover star for 2018, to find out about her creative process, how her history as a publicist has informed her filmmaking and what she wants to tackle next.

Adweek: You’re currently working on a mini-series for Netflix, Central Park Five, about the five teenagers who were wrongfully accused and convicted of raping a woman in 1989. What are you trying to accomplish with that narrative?
Ava DuVernay: At the time, in 1989 when the events were occurring, the story was very one-sided. They never really had a voice, whether it be in the press or the court of law. Their voices were coerced and contorted. The goal with this is to give those boys and their families a voice as it relates to this 30-year tragic story of justice ripped apart and obscured. This story is so much about humanity against systems, little black and brown boys against the halls of power and how they lost 25 years [of their lives].

At the time, Donald Trump paid for full-page newspaper ads calling for the return of the death penalty. Will you deal with this in the mini-series?
They’ll be referenced. They are a part of the story. I don’t think they are a big part of the story. The story that I’m telling is about the effect of this whole process on the boys, but he was certainly a part of that process, so they will be dealt with, those ads.

Can you tell us a bit about your creative process in general? Does it differ between formats?
I enjoy a certain privilege of the time I work in to be able to zig-zag and move across formats. As little as even 10 years ago, you were either a film director or a television director, you were either a commercial director or a documentary director or a narrative director. It’s all storytelling. At the end of the day, we’re trying to tell the story and make it as compelling, vibrant and heart-expanding as possible.

Tell us about directing that Apple Music commercial where Mary J. Blige, Taraji P. Henson and Kerry Washington talk playlists and mixtapes? Do you want to do any more commercial directing work?
I was personally invited by Jimmy Iovine and Bozoma Saint John to collaborate on a trio of commercials with a trio of incredible black women. We shot it in a day and had an absolute ball. I continue to do commercial work when I can. Particularly long-form or special projects like this one. I really enjoy it.

Do you have a specific creative routine? A place you have to be? A drink you have to have?
No, I like to feel comfortable, so it’s important to me to curate the people who are around me. … A big, big part of the creative process is who you’re being creative with. Beyond that, I like candles. With a good candle and some good people, you can brew up some magic.

Is there any message or anything you like to say when you’re starting to bring that group together for the first day on set?
Usually, I talk about the audience and the people that we’re making this for. That film is forever. These films are living, breathing things. Our names are on them. I expect that we will all take that seriously and keep in mind the story that we’re telling, the people we’re telling it for and the reason why we’re telling it as we go.

How do you deal with a creative block?
I’m a big procrastinator. I’ve embraced that as being part of my process instead of resisting it and being down on myself about it. Sometimes a deadline or a ticking clock instigates something within me that a leisurely kind of a long time to do something does not. I find that there’s something in that when I interrogate it. The time that I’m spending that’s called procrastination, that’s seen as negative because you’re putting something off. I feel like that’s really an incubation period because you’re thinking about it deeply.

Do you think activism and creativity have become more intertwined?
No. The challenge with people is that we always think the world is only happening now. All of this that we’re experiencing has happened before. To say that creativity and activism is more prominent now is to disregard, oh my gosh, civil rights movement artists, artists of the Vietnam protest era, the Suffragette movement, Japanese internment, Native Americans, people who were enslaved. The intertwining of art and resistance [has been happening] even before people came to this country, before this country was born, and things that are happening in other countries much older and much more mature than ours, so I think it’s not happening now more than ever, it’s just evidence that it is always intertwined. Activism is inherently a creative endeavor—it takes a radical imagination to be an activist, to envision a world that is not there. It takes imagination and that’s not far from art.

You’ve never done a genre film like A Wrinkle in Time before. What was it like to make that transition creatively?
It’s definitely a different creative muscle. The most fun I’ve had making anything was making Wrinkle. To be able to expand the edges of your imagination, to think of world-building, costumes, makeup and hair and planet hopping and all of that stuff. And to do it for 12-year-olds helped me exercise my imagination in ways that are much different than constructing a documentary that’s foundational material for people to think about crime and justice.

How was it received?
It’s been beautiful to watch kids and families embrace a story that was tailor-made for them, particularly kids and families of color and biracial, multiracial families, families that have adopted children, families that are untraditional, kids who feel like they don’t fit in a box.

Some of the things I hear on A Wrinkle in Time, about bullying, mentorship, adoption, being biracial, about being a woman or a girl in science, fathers coming up talking about relationships with their daughters, ego, achievement—all the things Madeleine L’Engle’s book is about and why it’s endured for all these years. It’s been really, really, really special and different.

For three seasons on Queen Sugar you’ve hired all women directors, sometimes giving directors their first shot at TV. Why do you think that’s important?
I’ve just tried to make sure that I’m not the only person in a given room who looks like me. In 2008, I started a film collective called Array that focuses on the work of people of color and women of all kinds to distribute their films. We’ve distributed 18 films so far. We have a film we just released on May 1 called Jewel’s Catch One by a woman filmmaker, about a great woman protagonist. It’s a documentary and it’s fantastic. The idea is that we are correcting past errors and that if we have the opportunity to make sure there are more kinds of people invited to this table called Hollywood that we do what we can to make it so.

Is there anything you took from your years as a publicist, promoting films and the conversations about marketing a piece of creative, that you’ve brought into the process of creating your own narratives?
The only thing that I learned from being a publicist moving into being a filmmaker is that nothing is unpublicizable, nothing is unpromotable. Some filmmakers think they have to hire a certain person, cast a certain person, or creatives think they have to tailor something to an audience to get more eyeballs. I know that’s not the case because I’ve successfully publicized all kinds of films with big stars and with folks that no one knows. It’s about the story. It’s about its execution. It’s about its heart, about what it means to people when they engage with it. That knowledge gives me a freedom when I’m working on things not to feel like I have to put work in a box to satisfy marketing.

Do you have any advice for people who want to make something?
Creativity is a word that is bandied around a lot, but it’s really a magic. It’s a gift. It’s something that has to be guarded, protected and preserved. That desire to want to make something, to want to write something, to want to dance, to want to paint, to want to do whatever—everybody doesn’t have that. So, if you have that—everyone can’t make an ad. Everyone can’t look at a bottle of hairspray and know how to share it with people. All that creativity is a magic that is not permanent. It’s all transitory. It’s very fickle. It’s important for creative people to exercise it like a muscle and care for it like a great gift and not take it for granted, really cultivate it in yourself like a seed and give it the fertile ground to blossom.

You were part of the team working to get the City of Los Angeles to implement inclusion riders. How did that process go and what do you think that will do for the industry?
I was the person who went to the press conference. There’s a large group of people working to make sure the industry in Los Angeles is open to all of the people who live in Los Angeles. When we walk into production offices and sets, we should see crews that reflect the city that we live in. There’s a lot of people working on it and I’m happy to be one of them.

Is that something you would also say about Time’s Up?
Oh yeah. Tons of people working on that. Happy to stand shoulder to shoulder with a lot of remarkable women doing a lot of solid work in that direction.

What was it like to be a member of the Cannes Film Festival jury? This year seemed to have quite a bit of activism at the festival.
Being at Cannes as a juror for the main competition was an extraordinary and transformative experience for me. It was like fuel. The exchange of ideas. The enormous emotion of the filmmakers. The beauty of the films. The vibrancy of the international film community. It all created within me a sense of stronger purpose and greater peace. I just loved and drank in every moment of it.

Is there anything you want to tackle next?
I’m just happy I haven’t run out of ideas, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen anytime soon. You’ve got to cultivate that seed of creativity, keep pushing and working. There’s not one kind of dream project that I pine for. My dream project is to have a long career, to be Agnès Varda, to be turning 90 and still making films, having fresh ideas and being activated by the work.

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