This Spotlight Interview is with our very own Head of Data Science and Risk Assessment, Mark Lewis. Mark chatted to me about his biggest achievements in and outside of work, favourite place to travel to and even calculated how many hours he’s spent on Excel in total… (it’s a lot!)
How long have you been here and how has your role developed over the years?
I’ve been here for 18 years! I started off in the company after my A-levels. My thought was to have a year out working and eventually go to university but as soon as I started earning money, going back to school became less and less appealing.
I began my life at Mando working in administrative roles, predominantly dealing with the consumers who were participating in the promotions Mando were conducting. This often resulted in some interesting conversations with disgruntled consumers who were calling in to find the whereabouts of their Pot Noodle Horn or Peperami Fanimal.
From here, I moved into a sales role working on various key accounts in the day to day running. It was with the sales team that my interest was piqued and really got to grips with the businesses core product of fixing sales promotion risk. It was an eye opener being at the sharp end of the business, creating fixed fee estimates and financial packages for all manner of weird and wonderful sales promotion concepts. So much so that I’ve been doing it for 13 years!
If you could eat one meal for the rest of your life, what would it be?
That’s a tough question! It could be anything, really. Is toast a viable answer? The Christmas Turkey roast dinner is always a classic…. I think it would have to be Indian, mainly because I don’t tend to have it very often. Not too spicy but I’m working my way up to a Vindaloo, my partner can’t handle any of it, so I don’t have it that often, maybe once a quarter!
What has been your favourite promotion to work on?
The Jewson Euro 2020 Campaign! So essentially, if you went to Jewson’s building merchants and spent over £250 worth on landscaping products and England went on to win the Euro 2020, the consumer could claim a cash back of the total amount of their spend.
So that’s kind of cool because from a quoting point of view, you’ve got to look at how many people are going to be buying the products, what their spends might be, registration rates but importantly, what are the chances England pulls it off and wins? It was an interesting one because it fit the target audience perfectly and piggybacked on a real socially conscious moment for England coming out of lockdown.
However, it did mean that whilst everyone was cheering England on, the Mando guys were cringing at how close we came to paying out on all those cashbacks for Jewson consumers.
What’s your number one tip for clients thinking about fixed fee in their promotion?
Fixed fee overall is an amazing concept because we’re able to use our data to forecast how much that idea is likely to cost in consumer response. Not only that, but we can also use the data to offer alternative suggestions to maximise engagement and really bring the idea to life.
I think my number one tip is to share as much information about your concept as possible, this helps shape the overall promotion thinking and allows for accurate forecasting.
What’s your biggest achievement in and outside of work?
Well, I’m still dining out on this, but I ran the 2012 London Marathon, which I’m quite proud of. It was a great experience, especially because it was the Olympic year in London, so the city already had a buzz about it. There’s nothing quite like the excitement (or was it fear?) buzz you get from standing at the starting area with thousands of other people knowing you’ve got a 26.2 mile run ahead of you.
In work, I would say building the risk team. Historically when I first moved into the sales team, each individual team would forecast and price their own fixed fees. This approach tends to lend itself to different interpretations, because different people have different approaches to it. We quickly saw that the best way to manage this work stream, was to have a dedicated team working on the data mining and risk calculation, which frees up the sales teams to continue their client work without being bogged down too much with Excel and formulas.
Favourite place to travel to?
I’ve been lucky enough to have travelled to some amazing countries, but I think you can’t beat a beach holiday to Barbados (despite my fair skin!). I’ve been a few times with my partners family and every time is unique. One memory that will always stick with me is seeing some baby turtles hatching out of their eggs on the beach. Because baby turtles’ instinct is to head towards light, they headed in the wrong direction away from the sea and towards the brightly lit street. We ended up helping a local Turtle charity round them all up and put them in the sea. Certainly not what we were expecting on our beach stroll home from dinner.
Tell us something surprising about you?
I love a challenge, especially locking into team activity-based ones. Probably my most memorable one apart from the marathon was the National Three Peaks Challenge. Climbing Ben Nevis in Scotland, Scaffel Pike in England and Snowden in Wales within 24 hours. When you couple the 22-mile climbs including the unpredictable weather as you get closer to the summits (particularly Ben Nevis!!) and the 10 hour combined drives in between each mountain, it makes for a tough challenge. We ended up completing it in 26 hours, so not quite within the timeframe but it felt like a huge achievement at the time.
I would like to reattempt it and go for the sub-24hr time…. maybe I can convince some of the Mando team to take it on with me…
What promotion do you think is impressive?
Back in 2019, Mando worked on a campaign called Vodafone Find Unlimited, designed to utilise the launch of the iPhone 11. Vodafone wanted to replicate the buzz of Pokémon Go by creating an AR game through a proprietary Vodafone app, which offered consumers rewards if they were in a certain location at a specific time.
The consumer had to locate virtual “presents” on the app’s map, which they could open when they reached the location. The presents were virtually scattered around London’s landmarks such as Tower Bridge and Trafalgar Square etc so it meant at different times of the day, people would congregate in these areas, glued to their phones hoping to be the lucky person to open their present to reveal they’ve won an iPhone.
It was the first time Mando had worked on an AR campaign like this and opened our eyes to how AR could be utilised for promotions.
How many hours in total do you think you’ve spent on Excel?
I came to about 34k hours after doing a quick calculation… on Excel!
If you were to star in a film, what film would it be and why?
Working with financial risk can often be a demanding responsibility. You must create a balance between ending up with a realistic projection that’s within budget for the client, but one that isn’t going to put the Mando bank balance in jeopardy. Our niche product is among a handful of products alongside the stock market and Insurance, where there is an element of loss that can be incurred if you get it wrong
Because of this, I tend to prefer escapism type films. Films that are completely disconnected from reality that I can immerse myself in and switch off. I’m currently reading The Lord of the Rings trilogy, so it’s probably a good time to say I’d probably want to be a Hobbit in one of those films. At least I’ve got some experience walking up mountains!
