Venetia Taylor, WPP Fellow 2000-2003

If you’re not keen to specialise immediately in a single communications discipline, the Fellowship might tempt you. It appealed to me because I want to learn how the marketing mix helps grow businesses; not uniquely Advertising or CRM or PR, the combination.

I’m interested in people more than in number crunching: what attracts us to certain brands? How do we understand and affect this connection? It’d take a lifetime to know, but three years working for three different companies, who approach these problems in different ways, for famous brands, is a dream start. Maybe the best bit is the collaboration between different agencies and disciplines thats facilitated by the people you get to know as you move around the WPP network. This Fellowship isnt an impossibly Tolkienesque fraternal ideal; your Fellow peers, guru Mentor, brilliant colleagues at JWT or OgilvyOne or wherever you work really will be a constant source of ideas, answers, challenges and the odd martini.

Now my business card says "Account Director, Integration” which means a dream job I wouldn’t be qualified for without the Fellowship. I work with 22 WPP agencies in 27 countries, helping to develop the core brand idea for HSBC and make it resonate across every point of contact with the customer, from advertising to branches to airports. Collectively, our job is to make all those contacts so involving, so intriguing and entertaining, that people will choose to interact with HSBC. A tall order, and an indecently wonderful way to spend my time.

A colleague at JWT calls the Fellowship WPP’s "Golden Ticket". I feel lucky to have won it.