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24 Hours With… Angela Rapley, director of content at PHD

24 Hours With… spotlights the working day of some of the most interesting people in Mumbrella’s world. Today we speak with Angela Rapley, director of content at PHD.

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7:00am The alarm goes off at 7. This is a rare treat as it’s school holidays and the hubby’s taken the kids for a few days to stay with his mum in Bathurst.

I reach for the mobile and check Twitter to see what’s happened overnight – has Trump made another faux pas? (undoubtedly); was Brexit just a bad dream? (unfortunately not). Being Irish and still having a flat in London has meant that Brexit was the root cause of much swearing in our house earlier this year.

With no kids to run after, breakfast today shall be eaten with Karl Stefanovic and the Today show on in the background – a glimpse (ish) of life outside the Sydney media bubble: Betty in Blacktown isn’t the quinoa munching, soy latte drinking, bikram fanatic that many media peeps would have us believe, you know!

8:00am Normally I would be negotiating the journey to school/daycare with my two girls, aged nine and four, which is usually eminently do-able, except when the younger one decides it’s the day that she wants to show off her newly-found skill of ‘’backwards walking’’ (literally), singing about a Kingdom of Isolation (inspiration: Elsa from Frozen, not Ian Curtis from Joy Division).

So my journey to work today is comparatively easy. On the bus, I alternate between left and right, the Guardian and the Mail – a habit I’ve had since I worked in Westminster for Sky News many years ago – and check the SMH.

I scroll through Spotify and pick a tune.  My listening habits have been largely unchanged since I was a teen – sad but true: angsty young men with guitars are still my mainstay although I have now added the likes of Courtney Barnett to the mix (an angsty young woman with a guitar whose sound is very reminiscent of aforementioned angsty young men). Maybe I need to borrow my nine-year-old’s TayTay CDs.

8:30am We moved offices a few months back so now I have a 20-min walk from Wynyard to Pyrmont. I have to remind myself to look up from reading my phone in my Spotify bubble to avoid the maniacs on bikes on Darling Harbour Bridge.

8:50am I get into the office and arrange a catch-up with Christian and Yuliya from my team over coffee in Pen, underneath our office. I marvel as they serve me a skim flat white made into an elephant – creativity knows no bounds in Pyrmont, at least in the caffeine world.

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We discuss the current workload – it’s 2017 planning for a lot of our brands and typically, the briefs have all come in at once. We are an SBU (specialist business unit) in PHD and our remit is pretty broad covering sponsorships & partnerships, content on any platform, talent/influencer activity and experiential.

But invariably there are always issues! We’re having some difficulties with one of our campaigns, so we talk through how best to navigate it whilst managing the client’s expectations. Ah, the joys.

We’ve got a teen girl brief on the table at the moment, and like 98% of these briefs these days, the client wants to enlist the support of ‘’influencers’’, that most nebulous of terms.

I explain to the guys the need to educate clients on the costs of working with these influencers, especially the YouTube ones, some of whom command serious wedge. It’s important to remember that just because a client hasn’t heard of a particular 18-year-old influencer who spends her time unpacking her shopping (literally)/putting her lippy on to the delight of millions of millennials, doesn’t mean said influencer won’t play hardball with fees!

They’re very savvy, these kids, and a lot of them have talent management just as hard-nosed as the celebrity ones I used to deal when I was a TV producer. Scary, but true.

10:00m Back to the office and I spend the next few hours working on our campaigns. Normally I would have multiple meetings during the day, both internal with our strategy/ account teams/MD and external with media owners and production partners, but unusually today I have a few hours of clear desk time to actually get s**t done. Pure bliss.

It’s a busy day for us, as we’re due to deliver our first TVC for a new Daikin campaign. We’ve been commissioned by the brand to develop and execute an extensive content strategy which involves us producing 23 pieces of AV content for their new website. The TVC is the first cab off the rank so there’s a lot of pressure.

We needed to get cut-through in the very cluttered air-con category, so built a giant Perspex cube (as you do) to torture-test Daikin at Mt Hotham, NSW (to see how the affixed air-con unit would fare in the freezing snow) and Coober Pedy, SA (to see how it would fare in the baking heat). Coober Pedy is an amazing/crazy place where it’s so hot people live underground!

I’ve done shoots all over the world but that was certainly one of the cooler (hotter) ones. Sometimes I thought I’d wandered onto a Star Wars set, and it’s not surprising this is where they shot Mad Max 3 and Priscilla: Queen of the Desert.

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We’re still working through the compositing and final editing of the ad with our production team, and we’ve got until 4:30pm to despatch or else we’ll miss our on-air this weekend. I drive my producer crazy as I ask to pull back the music and amend the voice over as I’m not 100% sure it’s working. She very graciously says that they’ll look into it, but no doubt is cursing me as the clock is ticking.

12:00pm I spend some time trying to catch up on my favourite part of my job – admin: cost reports, invoicing and working through my 2017 forecasting and targets for our lovely finance director, Kuan (see what I did there?)

1:00pm Whoever said that Fridays at a media agency involve long boozy media-owner lunches was a liar – or else has never worked in a content division. Lunch for me is a 15-min sandwich downstairs. Note to self: sort this out…

Afternoon Have another chat with Chloe about the guest list for the table we’ve booked for the upcoming MFA Awards. Our work with HP has been shortlisted for a number of different awards this year; there’s some fierce competition in our categories (including the awesome Ricky Gervais stuff for Optus) so am certainly not writing my acceptance speeches yet, but as the say in Hollywood, it’s nice to be nominated. We’ll no doubt quaff a few vinos, regardless.

I look at booking tickets to the OMG content conference, this time in Auckland: a quarterly meet-up with Anathea Rhys, the head of Fuse APAC (OMG’s content division) and the heads of content of all the Omnicom agencies in Aus/NZ.

Peter Horgan, our new OMG CEO, is going to be there too, which should be interesting. Good to swap stories and help each other navigate the challenges we face in a very cluttered, ROI-focused content world.

4:20pm With 10 minutes to go, we get confirmation of the successful despatch of the Daikin TVC to the networks. I email the client and we all heave a sigh of relief.

The lovely peeps at Bauer are hosting an Octoberfest drinks for our monthly PHD Four Thirsty Friday drinks session, but I have to leave early as I am going to Bathurst to meet up with my family.

5:52pm On the train I am sorely reminded it’s Bathurst 1000 race weekend and the chances of me getting any sleep on the train are zilch. I was lucky to get a seat. Race weekend attracts a lot of fans from all over the country, one group looking like they’re off to a non-ironic, non-post-modern Billy Ray Cyrus mullet convention. It’s going to be an interesting journey.

7:00pm Despite the fact that it’s Friday night, the fact that I can’t sleep means I try and do some overdue work and start to write some copy for a video script for one of our GSK brands. A woman gets on and sits beside me, meaning I have to put my bags and case in the leg space in front of me, leaving no room for my legs. I’m only 5’2 and-a-half (157cm) so it’s not like my legs are Gisele-esque but I still have the hump for the rest of the journey until she gets off at Katoomba.

9:30pm We arrive at Bathurst and eventually I get to kiss my kids goodnight, even though they’re fast asleep.

8:00am Up the next day and the hubby insists we drive up to Mount Panorama to see the warm-up races for the Bathurst 1000. Motor sports are not exactly my thing, but am pleasantly surprised at how much fun I have. Even the mullets are beginning to grow on me!anglela-rapley-phd-bathurst

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