Meet The Team: Darren Lennox

It’s time for another edition of Meet The Team and the person in the hotseat today is our account executive Darren Lennox. Since joining Trio Media, Darren has enjoyed getting stuck into working with a range of clients and improving his digital marketing knowledge.

Read on to learn more about how he moonlights as a craft beer blogger outside of work and what inspired him to spend a year playing poker for a living.

What’s your job at Trio Media and how did you start working for the company?

When I moved to Leeds part of the plan was to explore a new career path. I then set upon learning and teaching myself everything and anything to do with digital marketing.

I started a job in the industry but felt I lacked the support of likeminded creatives and the leadership I needed to help me develop professionally the way I needed.

This led me to being introduced to the amazing team at Trio via Baltic Apprenticeships. I’m currently completing the apprenticeship programme while working as an Account Executive at Trio.

What interested you about the digital marketing space to begin with?

I love learning, being creative and get excited by challenges. The fact that digital marketing is constantly changing and forces you to be creative and constantly evolve excites me.

I’m also fascinated by the science of it, being able to analyse in real time things like engagement and make calculated adjustments to your strategy and see them play out.

What are the biggest challenges of being an account executive and what parts of the job do you most enjoy?

I think my biggest challenge and what I most enjoy are more or less two sides of the same coin. Personally my biggest challenge is wanting to do everything myself and know everything – which when you have a few clients to work with is impossible.

This leads me to what I most enjoy about my role here at Trio Media – being around peers and people who are experts in the field that I can bounce ideas off and collaborate with to make sure our clients get the best service possible.

Along with your role at Trio Media, you also do some craft beer blogging outside of work. What kind of content creation is involved with this?

I’ve always had a massive interest in street art and craft beer, and I thought why not use all the digital marketing information I was teaching myself and combine it with one of my other hobbies. 

I’d just moved to Leeds and read there was a thriving street art scene and a bunch of local breweries who were making outstanding beer. I decided to explore my new city by checking out all the street art locations and local craft beer bars, breweries and bottle shops.

I then discovered Leeds Street Gallery, who are an organisation that provide legal art walls and free art spaces for artists in Leeds. The ever-changing walls and extravagant beer can art gave me the idea of pairing the designs.

My content naturally evolved to match can design with local street and graffiti artists, allowing me to showcase the brewery and also the local artists at the same time.

You once spent a year playing poker for a living. How did this happen?

After graduating I treated myself to a trip to Las Vegas. Poker had a huge boom around 2003 and online poker had become huge as well, with UK TV showing the World Series Of Poker.

On my trip to Vegas to play I happened to find myself at the table with a couple of other Scottish people who lived in Vegas, which led to me finding a job with them and pretty much playing poker every hour I wasn’t working or sleeping.

In the immediate future I imagine the trend in video marketing will continue to be more important.

In the long term I think we will see the rise in the use of virtual reality and more importantly the growth of artificial intelligence. AI is already prominent in the use of chat bots but how we utilise it for data analysis, predicting user behaviour and improving user experience could be innovative in the future.

How do you see your career developing in digital marketing and have you got any specific goals you’d like to achieve?

Firstly, the plan is to complete my apprenticeship and I think that will shape how my career develops.

I love all the aspects involved in digital marketing and my main aim is to improve my knowledge of everything which I can certainly do with the team I have around me at Trio.

What kind of advice would you offer for anyone who’s interested in working in the digital marketing industry?

Stay up to date on all current trends and just make sure you are constantly learning. It’s an industry that does not stand still so you can’t afford too either.

Take advantage of as many online courses as possible and get certified in anything you can.

Be sure to check out the interview with our account manager Colleen Kelly and for more information on the digital marketing services we provide, get in touch on 0113 357 0440.