Mindshare China: Empowering young talent

At Mindshare China, we have focused as a team on 90s gen talent … they are the future of the agency – creators of entirely new business models, original thinking, and inherently adaptive to the future. Not to mention a target audience our clients see as inherently tied to the future of their businesses.

To get the best out of young talent, the agency has to ensure they know their ideas are not only heard, but also valued. Making this happen requires not just giving them a platform to express themselves, but also a willingness to support the execution of their ideas both financially and organizationally – through time and mentorship.

When our young talent realize their voices are heard, their engagement with the company skyrockets – and our business growth and product development accelerates dramatically.

We directly credit this approach with delivering a number of highlights for the agency:-

• The creation of our most awarded campaign to date
• The creation of one of our most exciting new products – Gaming+
• The creation of thought leadership initiatives like the Mindshare Luxury Review
• Our marketing communications efforts which now have over 10,000 followers
• A number of our key pitch wins this year

Second, to retain young talent most effectively, the agency must provide the opportunity to grow and expand their experiences. 

We take this incredibly seriously at Mindshare China, where we have built robust programs that enable both professional and geographic exploration for employees.

Not only do we send 20 percent of our China-based staff overseas each year for training and exchange programs as well as conferences, but we launched the Mindshare +1 Day Initiative. Designed to encourage exploration of our global network, the program offers employees a simple proposition: if any staff visit a city overseas where Mindshare has an office, we will pick up the hotel tab for them to spend an extra day in our sister office, learn how they operate, and share their experience with the China office upon their return. With 116 offices worldwide, this has rapidly become one of our most successful programs to date.

For professional growth, we have the Dandelion Project, which enables our talent to enroll in six-month exchange programs across offices and specialist teams. Designed to encourage greater team collaboration, the program has helped identify the agency’s future leaders across content, programmatic, and strategic planning.

Launching these programs is one thing, but ensuring that they continue from year to year requires that every single member of Mindshare China’s leadership team believes in the value of mentoring homegrown talent. Perhaps this is made easier by the fact that our China Exco has spent on average 12.2 years in the WPP network, and each remember the absolute value of previous mentors in their own careers.

Lastly, celebrating young talent. When we showed our 2016 Talent Film for the first time – the very first question we got was, aren’t you afraid of others poaching them? And that may well happen, but we understand the value there is to genuinely appreciating the change they have made to the company and it would be disingenuous of everything we want to do from a talent perspective to not celebrate each and everyone of them.

We understand that building the agency of the future requires us to continually adapt. And our young, homegrown talents are the foundation for that adaptive agency built for the future. But hear from some of our best and brightest why they have felt Mindshare China is their home for the future.