Yamile Mahomed

I've been in advertising and marketing since 2006, and my journey began when I combined my psychology studies with marketing in college. My first advertising job was with Bimbo Marinela, a brand and product I grew up with alongside my grandparents in Mexico - I used to have a gancito marinela with my chocumi as a kid, so working with that brand holds a very special place in my heart. That's what really opened the key for me to embrace and fall in love with this career. What draws me to this work is the entire creative process - bringing a print piece, a TV commercial, whatever we're working on, through the entire journey from briefing to meetings with clients to executions to working with the creative team. Getting to see the final product of hard work live is something pretty incredible, like giving birth to something. A 30-second commercial takes months and months of work and requires an entire team of people, and I enjoy and love that entire process. Currently, I've been with Verizon for going on 5 years. My role now is a little different - it's more project management-based and operational-based rather than creative-based. I'm working on the client side, managing anywhere between 40 to 50 projects at any given point in different life cycles of creation, working with multiple campaign managers on various digital tactics and managing the entire process of execution from when the project is brought in to when it's actually sent out to the consumer. What I find most rewarding these days is being able to have that work-life balance - I've done the 80-hour weeks, and at this point in my career, it's nice to have that balance.