My Story, Our Story: Marta Marchionni
9 June 2015The Alumni of BBS talk about themselves: what was before, what came after, and the memories of being a student. They open a window to their life to share a personal story and a narration of one’s own professional experience, to share a story of our Community.
The protagonist of the fourth episode is Marta Marchionni, Head of Doubleclick Media Buying Solutions of Google Italia, MBA distance learning VI, 2004-2006 (currently Professional MBA Part-time).
Marta has chosen her soundtrack: Under Pressure by The Queen and David Bowie.
Ouverture
Referential, oblique, mythical or substantial, advertising has always been a passion for Marta, or perhaps a destiny. Even, thinking of where Marta is currently working, something that may make you feel dizzy. It’s a company that meets people’s needs to look for things and find them. “After my degree in text semiotics in 2001, I started my career in the advertising world for Repubblica, L‘Espresso and all the other newspapers of the L’Espresso group for Emilia-Romagna. Then I moved to Milan, at Google, where I’ve been working for the last seven years. Three years ago I moved to the Doubleclick team, a platform for the misuration and automation of digital marketing”.
The story so far
The first methodological problem of Semiotics is to define what a text is. The answer, illuminating and simple, is that a text is everything that can be read. Thus commercials-guzzling Marta wrote her thesis in Text Semiotics on something that can be read: an identity. It was the identity of a small, emerging brand, Cruciani, her tutor being Patrizia Magli and her supervisor Roberto Grandi (with the exception of Magli, there’s already a lot of BBS here). Then a jump into the advertising world, in the toughest sector: selling spaces to advertisers. So, after seven years of pages, the screen is the new white sheet to be filled.
Why BBS
“Because it has a strong identity and there were welcoming people who inspired and trusted me, straight away, more than others. And also… I’m a fan of the Villa!”. Aged 28, Marta felt the need to widen her knowledge, she was proud of her humanities and semiotics studies but she felt she could give more. It was the branch director at Manzoni who convinced her that managerial training was a good investment. If that experience had enriched someone with a degree in Economics, why couldn’t it be the same for her?
Validating evidence
Going from a traditional advertising environment to the technological one was quite a leap. “Very different logics and selling cycles characterise these two segments. I felt very weak during the transition, but I was wrong”. Indeed, with the Google option still open, Marta discovered she was pregnant. “It wasn’t planned, in any possible way: it was a big surprise that would shake again my personal and professional life”. Marta took her decision and a double somersault: she changed job, company and commercial sector. With a belly full of changes. “I was able to manage the situation. I came out of it stronger and with greater trust in myself”.
A magical word
Marta doesn’t often go back to her native Foligno. Even her two and a half year old toddler “is a rather urban boy, metropolitan I should say!” enjoying Milan. Marta starts working at 9 and leaves her office at 7 in the evening, a very good schedule for an across-function manager. She’d like to do many things, mainly some volunteering, but it’s hard to find space for the topics she cares for in a diary full of responsibilities, at work and at home with her family.
I ask her whether there’s something that inspires her. A magical word opening your own personal search? “In the first part of my life I was very much focused on myself, today I’m more sensitive about what happens around me. I’d say Solidarity”.
(Editor’s Note)
“At work I always try to live up to my expectations and my colleagues’.” One can sense it even over the phone, even though Google phones aren’t that great –search “office phones”, come on. I imagine Marta imagining herself as the commercials-guzzling Marta of many years ago, a girl with a degree in Communication, onto whom she herself decided to graft a commercial-managerial device, to put herself to the test.
A piece of advice to a student
“Try and get your degree quickly, don’t linger over an academic career if you are not interested. Travel, study at least a year abroad. Take advantage of the most consolidated exchange programmes and try and enter the labour market as soon as possible. Immediately after getting my degree I granted myself one year to look for a job, to understand how to apply my set of knowledge to the market. The sooner you do it, the better.”
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