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Channel 4 Diversity & Inclusion Girl Guides

Girl Guides: Channel 4's director of audience technologies & insight Gill Whitehead advises women to have a long term view of their career

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By Jennifer Faull, Deputy Editor

March 12, 2014 | 6 min read

Continuing The Drum’s Girl Guides series which aims to encourage young women to join the digital industry, Jen Faull catches up with Channel 4 director of audience technology & insight Gill Whitehead, who advocates a long term career outlook.

Gill Whitehead has made some savvy moves in her career to reach where she is today, leading Channel 4’s much lauded viewer engagement strategy as director of audience technologies & insight. But you would be mistaken to think her enviable career in digital landed on her lap. On the contrary, Whitehead urges women to have a long term career outlook, and to not be shy about asking for the experience that will take you exactly where you want to go. Perhaps surprisingly, Whitehead started her career as an economist at the Bank of England. She likens it to the scene in Mary Poppins when the children get taken to the bank by their father. “It was full of grey haired white men wearing bow ties who all addressed each other as Mr Smith or Mr Jones,” she laughs. “That was the Bank of England at the time that I worked there and I thought, culturally, this isn’t for me.”She instead made the move to strategy consulting, working for the likes of Andersen and Deloitte where she helped one client, Com Hem, launch what she believes to be the first digital television service. “At the time it was a huge innovation, and of course now looks ghastly,” she recalls, but that turned out to be her road into the media industry and led her to join the executive committee at BBC Worldwide as head of strategy at the tender age of 28. “In terms of getting into digital, it was a case of spotting the opportunities that were coming up and working with the people around me that would give me that break to jump from strategy into running a business,” she tells us, explaining how she eventually made the move to heading up BBC Worldwide’s commercial version of the iPlayer.“I think that jump is best made within an existing business rather than something new because of the sponsorship and support that you want around you.” After being headhunted by Channel 4 she was asked by CEO David Abraham to “basically use the fact that television is now connected to the internet” to learn more about its viewers and offer them more personalised content. And so, three years ago, the ‘viewer engagement strategy’ was born. Whitehead describes the project as both her proudest achievement and her most challenging experience to date, revealing that one of the important lessons she has learnt is to put time into getting people on side.“When you’re embarking on a major strategic transformation, which by their very nature many digital projects are, particularly in a traditional media company, then how you manage that change is enormous, and not to be underestimated,” she explains. “The effort that you have to put into really getting people on side is huge, and you have to build it in from the outset. It can be a rewarding challenge and one that can go really well, but you need to factor this in from the start.” By the same token Whitehead is quick to attribute the bulk of the project’s achievements to her team, which she reveals took two years to put in place as “talent in this area is so hard to find”.“We’ve had big milestones recently,” she beams. “Hitting 10 million registered viewers shows real scale and demonstrates return on big data. And bringing the whole thing into profit within three years of starting is something I’m really proud of.”Discussing the growing number of women succeeding in the digital sector, Whitehead says that, rather unusually, she has never found it to be particularly male dominated. “I think I’ve had a very lucky experience,” she admits. “My experience at Channel 4, at the BBC, and in consulting was very much that there were women at all levels, and with a seemingly 50/50 split.”However, she concedes that she does know what it is like to be the only female voice in the room, having spent time on the YouView board alongside Alan Sugar, and believes that the experience can be an empowering one. “In those situations I’ve personally found that, almost because your voice is so different from the rest of the room, people will actually stop and listen in a way that they might not listen to each other,” she says, encouraging women not to shy away from these moments and to instead find the confidence to embrace them precisely because they’ll be thinking in a slightly different way to the rest of the people in the room.More generally, she encourages women to try and have a long term career outlook and think about where they want to be in five and 10 years’ time.“That is not too ambitious a thing to do,” she maintains. “It allows the people around you to support you and it adds another dimension to the day job. You can still do the day job, but you’re looking out for projects and opportunities and thinking about your network. I would encourage women to do that from their first job – develop a long term view and use each opportunity to get a roundedness of skills and experiences that get you there in the long term.” Going back to her own career, Whitehead says that the year ahead will be full of new challenges, not least because, at the time of writing, she is mere weeks away from welcoming her second child. A testament to her ‘one step ahead’ mantra, she is already laying the foundations for her return from maternity leave and will be forging ahead with the next phase of the viewer engagement strategy, applying the techniques honed to the creative side of the business. “Lots of good challenges ahead,” she concludes excitedly. This article was first published in the 5 March issue of The Drum.
Channel 4 Diversity & Inclusion Girl Guides

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