From store manager to award-winning creative

Sophie McGovern: I was working as a store manager at a clothing store in Borough Market. One of the guys I worked with had studied art direction at university, and he said, "I can't enter this programme myself, but you need to do it. You'd be so good at it." At that point, I had absolutely no idea that advertising was a thing, I just assumed brands did their own work. I'd never even seen Mad Men. It was a completely foreign concept.

I'd always loved writing, but I thought it was something you did in your diary at night. I never knew you could get paid for it. I thought you could write a book, and that was it. So I took a gamble. You had to submit three pieces of creative work, and I entered a piece I'd written about how conversation is the most creative thing you can have, a light design I'd done and some photographs. I got accepted onto the Shift programme. I was like, this is mad – I never thought I'd get in.

Something really clicked on the first day of Shift. I thought, oh my gosh – not only is there a space for me here, there's opportunity. Everything I love doing exists in this career path, and I'd just never seen it before. I got a placement straight out of the Shift programme at an agency called MRM.

Sophie McGovern: MRM was the best place to hone your craft as a writer. In a digital environment you're writing headlines, you're writing long-form copy, you're learning how to write everything and anything for everything and anything. I did that for about four years, and I had incredible creative directors. One of them would go through every single word with me and ask, what could be better? It was a genuine education.

From there, things progressed. I'd gone from a three-month placement to a six-month placement, and at the six-month mark they were like, okay, this girl's legit - let's invest, give her a contract, give her an art director. So I was paired with an art director, and we've worked together ever since. His name is Alex. That's now been a decade.

We started at MRM, then moved to Mullenlowe, and that's really where we started doing work through the line - huge global platforms running across every market in the world. TV, radio, activations, digital, everything. I feel like that mirrors my experience on the Shift programme - every session at D&AD I learned something, I grew, I got better. And that's been true of my career as a whole. Every year I've gotten better, smarter, stronger in my craft. And I think that's what's allowed me to do what I do.

Sophie McGovern: Yes, and that was probably the reason I hated post-secondary education so much. I felt like a square peg in a round hole. I now know that's just how creative people are wired. At the time, though, I didn't have a word for it, so I just thought I was an idiot. I didn't even think of myself as different, exactly. I just knew there was something there that didn't fit the mould.

Retail came very naturally to me. You're constantly solving problems through conversation. It was always, okay, this approach isn't working - what's a smarter way to get there? What's a different way to achieve the same end? So in hindsight, that was the beginning of the spark. And it's very people-focused - you're talking to the public every single day, learning what they need, working out how to help. Which is basically a grassroots education in marketing, when you think about it.

Sophie McGovern: Essentially, a client comes to us with a business or brand problem, a strategist takes a look at it, and then we take a run at it. Every brief is different. The briefs I get now tend to be global, which sounds very glamorous – but honestly, I miss UK TV briefs more than anything. They're just the funniest to work on. If a UK TV brief comes in, I want it immediately. But global briefs tend to be the big ones - launching a brand new product, repositioning a brand and figuring out how to do that at scale across every market. It's just about thinking creatively: what do we need to achieve, and what's the most unexpected way to get there that's still going to resonate with consumers? It ends up being a lot of scripts, and when it's global you're doing everything – TV, out-of-home, social, activations. Which is creatively brilliant, because I feel like every year I've added another string to my bow, and now I'm using all of them every single day. You need a TV script for Turkey? No problem. A billboard campaign for the UK? Great. A social activation with a celebrity? Let's come up with something cool. And then the big one – we need to win some awards, so let's do something really special.

Sophie McGovern: I have a Pencil for a piece of work called Nipplevision, for a brand called Tommee Tippee. They'd created a bottle designed to mimic a breast - because babies like boobs - and our whole idea was that babies see boobs everywhere. So in the work, everyday objects morph and merge into breasts. We got a Pencil for that.

Sophie McGovern: Being around people with completely different experiences and backgrounds, watching how each one of us attacked the same brief in a totally different way - that teaches you something fundamental. Our audiences are diverse. We need to be telling real human stories, and those come in every shape and form. If you want to do that justice and make genuinely good work, you have to actively seek out different perspectives. The moment you bring in someone with a genuinely different experience, everything unlocks.

It's about looking for inspiration in the places other people aren't looking - or wouldn't think to look. Shift really champions that. Going through the work together, having access to people who'd say things like, "The insight for this came from something my nan said" - and you'd think, bloody hell, this entire campaign came from one sentence. But that's exactly it. Insights and inspiration can come from anyone and anything. You just have to be consistently looking for them, consistently chasing them. You can't keep going back to the same well. You have to keep feeding your brain.