In this monthly column with NGEN, the MFA’s training program for media professionals with less than five years’ experience, the NGEN Award 2024 winners relive their journey from study buddies to colleagues and award entrants – presentation mishaps included.
Marcus: Before we talk NGEN, let’s backtrack to what put Ange and I here.
Angelina: Uni or our mums?
Marcus: Both.
Angelina: Full transparency – Marcus and I first met in university while studying the same degree, becoming fast friends and working on many group projects together. But after graduating, we hadn’t crossed paths in quite some time.
Fast forward to 2024, we both ended up at News Corp Australia – Marcus strategising in the Client Partnerships world, and me marketing News’s Commercial Products. We occasionally came across one another socially, but we’d been hoping at some stage we would actually get to work together again.
Marcus: Then the NGEN brief came out, with Dress For Success (DfS) as the charity. I instantly emailed Ange saying it was time to team up. Little did I know that coincidentally, both our Mums had also volunteered at Dress For Success when we were kids.
Angelina: Who doesn’t love a little added pressure?
Marcus: We kicked off by going back to the design thinking training we learned at Uni.
Angelina: Problematising! Thoroughly mapping the problem space, asking who, what, why, why again and why not!
Marcus: We used method cards, interviewed our mums and spent a bulk of time pulling apart the problem space with discovery and in-depth research. We eventually boiled it down into a cultural truth – mirrors are a window into our inner confidence. Just think about the pep talks we give ourselves in front of the mirror, hyping ourselves up!
Angelina: And confidence was something we knew was lacking in the DfS target audience. Many of the women who turn to the charity are seeking more than just a wardrobe makeover, yet they often aren’t aware that DfS offers much more than a change of clothes.
Marcus: Using mirrors to build your inner confidence fuelled our idea: Mirror Your Success.
Angelina: We’d make mirrors “magic”, using the power of AR and AI to style women in the clothes of their dream job, while also putting them in the environment of that job – dressing them in the skills and training needed to feel confident in whatever career path they choose.
Marcus: Think seeing yourself in a suit pitching to a boardroom in the mirror, and then connecting with DfS to learn more about the skills needed for that winning pitch.
Angelina: It’s more than a makeover. We wanted to empower women with long-lasting confidence! We refined this again and again, with feedback from a lot of great people.
Marcus: Adam, Kate, Mel – our Mums!
Angelina: Bouncing off their thinking, all of them helped us take this idea to submission.
Marcus: But it doesn’t end there.
Angelina: We submitted, and we moved on, back to the everyday hustle.
Marcus: Until a morning phone call in August inviting us to pitch live in front of judges that very afternoon.
Angelina: It was around 9:45am when we got the call, and we had to be there by 1pm. It’s safe to say with less than four hours to prep our pitchcraft, we weren’t the calmest versions of ourselves.
Marcus: I was desperately searching for a mirror to do our big idea reveal. We pitched that afternoon to the MFA judges, and everything was going to plan, until…
Angelina: We lost our last four slides mid-pitch. The clicker finished and somehow our slides hadn’t carried over into the presentation – and we still had so much left to go.
Marcus: My heart sank. All that prep and work was now only in our heads.
Angelina: So we improvised.
Marcus: The rest of the presentation was a blur.
Angelina: Very much so, but we pushed through and I’m still proud of us for not skipping a beat.
Marcus: I left that room thinking we had botched it, so when the MFA Awards night came around, I felt embarrassed.
Angelina: We were convinced we had no chance. We had improvised our “planned” presentation. A media owner had never won before. The odds were not in our favour.
Marcus: And then somehow… we won!
Angelina: We were shocked, grateful, and so relieved.
Marcus: While we had faith in ‘Mirror Your Success’ and were passionate about the idea, our pitching mishap had just thrown us.
Angelina: We feel connected and passionate about the work DfS does, and hope we’ve played a part in connecting the charity with more women who need its services.
Marcus: From this whole competition, our biggest learning was finding confidence in ourselves when we’ve done everything we can – to back ourselves in the work and effort we put in.
AD: Which we’re definitely taking into our day to day in 2025.
Marcus Billingham-Yuen is a Client Strategy Lead and Angelina Das is a Product Marketing Specialist at News Corp Australia. They’re coming up with brilliant silverback gorilla-sized ideas.
