We sat down with Rebekah Billingsley, Global Innovation Director at Cedar Communications to discover more about the company and her role. What she does daily and what she loves about her job
Cedar Communications is a world leading Content Marketing Agency with offices around the globe including London, Hong Kong, Spain and South Africa. We run some of the most famous and long-running content programmes in the world for brands such as British Airways, Tesco, Cathay Pacific, Eurostar, Mandarin Oriental and Jaguar Land Rover. Our building is teeming with creative talent such as editors, journalists, subs, designers, strategists and insight experts, media planners and sales experts, as well as a full digital development team, delivering award-winning content across social, video, print and online. In essence, we create content that changes the way people think, feel and behave.
One reason I love my role is that typical days don’t exist. But you might find me supporting a new product launch such as our new tool on the Tesco Real Food website (www.realfood.tesco.com), created in response to lockdown and the need to find recipe inspiration from ingredients we already have; it’s providing amazing insight into the real time national psyche. I spend a lot of time (on Teams these days) working across our talented departments to unlock opportunities and solve problems. We all take our client time seriously, so we’ll often try to replicate the old world and catch up via virtual breakfasts and lunches. Cedar is great at ensuring we find time to develop ourselves as colleagues too and we’ve unlocked some incredible training opportunities for all staff with Facebook and Google.
I have an open brief, which gives me a unique breadth. What’s really exciting is to be tasked with finding new opportunities for such big, well-established and open-minded clients. It means that the projects we develop can hit market at scale, genuinely shift customer behaviour quickly and provide quick learnings. Often innovation fails to find an audience or takes too long to find results, and it’s just better without those barriers.
The events and networking are great and I’m really looking forward to hosting a round table soon. We are especially delighted this week to have announced that we have not one, but two, BIMA 100 Winners in our midst (Charlotte Jones and Renee Lo). That’s been an amazing thing to be able to shout about and celebrate over Friday ‘Quaratinis’.
One of our team came back from a breakfast fuelled with inspiration and great contacts, one of which is helping us unlock a potential new opportunity which is in R&D right now. We love the breadth of membership.