A Day in the Life of Will Lebens

Name:
Will Lebens

Company:
AIRLOCK (www.airlock.com)

Job title:
MD

What keeps you busy all day?
Business planning and development, incessant banter from my business partners & having an open-plan office.

What keeps you awake at night?
Deciding what to wear.

Describe your working day:
Up at 4.30 for assorted Taoist and Buddhist practices. 7.30 plug brain in to various feeds & check email. Showered & fed by 8.15. Walk to work. In the office by 8.30 for the first planning session – currently software related. Tactical biz dev meet with Chris, our Strategy Director. Finance meeting. Lunch, preferably at Rochelle Canteen. Client status. Pitches. Save the world via email. Pub Quiz at William IV if it’s a Monday, Wing Chun if it’s a Wednesday, NCT if it’s a Thursday. 30 INPUT a$ “Repeat”.

What’s your busiest time of day?
Generally before 7pm.

What brands/accounts have you worked on?
Quite a lot. When we were purely advertising focused as an agency we were turning around different campaigns every week – Diesel, Smirnoff, Motorola, Burberry, BMW, Heineken. These days we also focus on Broadcast and multiplatform; we just launched www.topgear.com, Maestro for the BBC, The MTV EMAs, and a great series for Channel 4 called Battlefront (www.battlefront.co.uk).

Best day at work:
Diesel have a “marketing meeting” twice a year somewhere exotic in a fancy hotel. I had a pretty good day at one of those in 2005, which culminated in meeting my future wife. Which was nice.

Worst day at work:
Returning from anywhere hot.

Ambitions:
Spread the love. We recently expanded to Australia and definitely have further international aspirations. We also have a couple of other exciting projects in the pipeline, which could make ownership of my own Zeppelin one step closer.

Advice to other rising stars:
Carpe diem.

Quote from the boss:
The days of having a boss are happily behind me. We’re a very collaborative management team though and it’s always good when you feel like you’re getting it right.