Q&A with Rising Star of the Year shortlist: Angie Ferrara Coppola

In this Q&A, Angie Ferrara Coppola, Digital Marketing and Brand Manager at Bird & Bird shares her thoughts on being nominated in the Rising Star of the Year, Grand Prix category at The Masters 2015. See the full list of nominees here.

Please give us a brief description of your role.

I'm Digital Marketing and Brand Manager. My role is to lead the development of our visual identity, our digital presence and our mixed media channels.

Describe your career path so far. Why do you think you’ve been nominated?

I graduated with a 1^st class hons in Social Communications back home in Venezuela. When the political situation got really tense in my home country, especially for journalists, I decided to migrate into London, a city I only knew from literature. I arrived I found a temporary job with Bird & Bird, copying and pasting content on the website for six months.

A few months later, a new leadership team joined the department and they created a Digital Marketing Assistant role, which they recognised I was a good match for and they decided to offer me the role.

In that role, I helped the firm plan and prepare for a full online presence revamp to reflect the firm's strategic focus on disruptive technologies. This included a very ambitious website relaunch, which was one of the firm's three major projects. When the digital manager decided to leave, I was asked to take charge of the project and was made an executive.

The project gave me the opportunity to demonstrate my initiative and my innovative approach, and I gained respect and gratitude from all levels within the firm. I also initiated or contributed heavily to launching projects like our news publishing strategy, social media, blogging, videos, search engine strategy and more. I trained dozens of people around the world and grew a wonderful team of people capable of doing amazing things online. In addition, I was speaking at the same level with very tough stakeholders internally and promoting the firm's digital team successfully.

My managers continued to give me opportunities to grow and develop, and we continued to introduce new digital channels such as apps. Reflecting this, I was promoted to digital marketing manager and then, more recently, following a reorganisation within the team, I was asked to also lead the design team. This involves leading the development of our visual identity, with the aim of bringing together our thinking on UX and design to maximise synergies across these areas.

I think I've been nominated because, in a very tough B2B professional services environment, I proved that I am a commercially savvy, yet technically proficient marketer. I have played a key role in transforming perceptions of Bird & Bird. According to our independent satisfaction surveys, during my time at the firm, client perceptions of our marketing materials have risen by 10% and we are now viewed as one of the most digitally savvy international law firms. I am also completely committed to the beauty and potential of brand and digital communications, so continue to look for new ways to drive our marketing forward.

What has been your proudest achievement in your career so far?

Every day is an amazing achievement in my eyes, I'm ever so grateful for the chance of being here in London, and in Bird & Bird, and I do my very best to make sure I make the most of what we have. Among my proudest products I would count the relaunched website, which took many months of late nights to put together and earned Bird & Bird a Sitecore Site of the Year Award in 2013, and which I continue to look after and improve on every day. More recently I also created a mobile app for our largest internal event, which saved the firm a huge amount of money and also over 50,000 sheets of paper!

Who has been your most valuable mentor, and why?

My boss and Head of Marketing Communications at Bird & Bird, Keith Hardie, is my most valuable mentor. He joined only months after I did and saw the potential in me to be more than a copy-paste assistant. He gave me the confidence to think I could run projects as large as I do, and helped me stand up for myself. He gave me visibility in front of the tough audience of lawyers we work with and he's never been apprehensive about letting me take on more responsibility. The experience I've gained through that trust is absolutely priceless and I'll be forever grateful for it.

What do you think will be the next steps in your career?

I see myself as an user experience specialist and I want to continue to learn and develop myself in that area. I'm hugely interested in human-computer interaction and I'm an avid futurism follower. Within my career I'm constantly tackling new challenges: new media, new audiences, new messages, and I would like to continue to do so. I know for sure I will never run out of challenges as long as there's good content out there to be promoted.

Do you think it’s harder for people to break into marketing these days? Why?

I think these days it's actually easier to break into marketing activities than it must've been in the past: Communications channels are everywhere and are more accessible than they've ever been. New marketers have so many wonderful tools at their disposal these days, and finding one's target audience is also just a few searches away. I think it's down to creativity and motivation these days; a lack of tools or specialist skill is no longer an excuse.

Nobody’s career path is totally smooth. Please tell us about the most awkward moment in your marketing career.

Probably one of the most difficult moments in my career was the start of my job at Bird & Bird. On my first day the person who was meant to be my manager gave me a call and said: "Angie, it's been great meeting you, but I'm not coming back into the office, goodbye and best of luck." I headed to IT wondering what to do next and they handed me two heavy books on how to manage the website that the technical agency had given them. I spent the rest of the day and all night reading through the stacks over and over again and trying to make sense of it. I broke the site a couple of times (yikes!) as I learned but people were forgiving and, by the end of the ordeal, I had taught myself how to manage a large, complex website.. I guess all's well that ends well.

What would winning an award mean for you?

I would be thrilled, it would mean all the extremely talented and experienced people in the jury also think that my effort has been worthwhile and that there's a bright future ahead for me. I would love that kind of reassurance and the learning opportunities that could arise from it!