‘Boundless opportunity’: How one internship is changing the game for emerging talent

From Meta to Amazon, McDonald’s to Pepsi, already 2025 has seen a host of major global brands scrap their diversity, equity and inclusion targets.

In this climate, businesses which prioritise inclusion as a business imperative stand out. One such organisation is the John Doe Group, which in November won Marketing Week and the Advertising Association’s 2024 Talent Trailblazer Award, celebrating the organisations and individuals opening the industry up to new talent.

Launched in summer 2023, the agency group’s Unlocked Internship Programme aims to kickstart opportunities for emerging talent looking to join the UK’s creative industries, based on insight that young people from low-income backgrounds are significantly underrepresented.

The origins of Unlocked can be traced back to a train ride home from an industry event attended by John Doe Group managing partner and chief creative officer, Pamela Scobbie, and Mercy Abel, the agency’s impact and marketing lead and Unlocked programme director.

You can go fast, but you can’t go far and that’s why the internship, the process and the programme itself is really built on collaboration.

Mercy Abel, John Doe Group

Her first in-person event since joining the industry during lockdown, Abel was shocked to see how white the advertising profession was, especially as the only other people of colour in attendance that night were serving the tables.

“Mercy was talking about how uncomfortable she felt in that room,” Scobbie explains. “I said: ‘The only thing I can liken this to was walking into rooms of leadership and being asked: ‘Where did you school?’ And me being like: ‘You wouldn’t know and if you did, it would be for all the wrong reasons.’”

Starting out in the industry more than 25 years ago, Scobbie worked three jobs to fund an unpaid internship just to get her foot in the door.

“Nobody in my world ever had worked in anything creative, I had no ins. There was no nepotism. There were no levers I could pull upon, but I had bills to pay. I lived by myself. I had to feed myself,” she recalls.

“I just always remember thinking ‘It really will have changed by now’ and it hasn’t.”

Prior to joining the agency, Abel’s work in the diversity and inclusion space showed her businesses can be big on goodwill, but slow when comes to taking real action. This is something she was determined to change.

“Every time I think about how the birth of the programme was on the train home from an event it’s such an incredible feeling, because I’m big on lived experience and when you feel something – and you are in a scenario where the feeling is hard to describe but you both get it – that really sparked that conversation,” says Abel.

“It’s a testament to the leadership team at John Doe because it was all open ears and just being: ‘OK, we see it, we hear it, we feel it. What do we do about it?’”

The team spent months researching the internship landscape, failing to find an existing programme matching their ambition. There were agencies offering paid internships, but those were typically for the top 1% of students studying at the Glasgow School of Art, or applicants with a first-class degree.

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“Great that they’re paid, but it’s still incredibly exclusionary,” says Scobbie.

“We talk passionately as an industry about representation and the richness of different perspectives in creating the very best work. We talk about the fact that we can affect change, we can affect brand performance, but we’re not leaning into actually making the change.”

The personal passion of Abel and Scobbie inspired Unlocked to focus on offering internships for people of colour and those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. They could also see how ethnicity and socio-economic diversity directly intersect with other marginalised identities, such as gender and sexuality.

The team talked in depth to people beyond the agency to build the programme’s foundation, including founders, strategists and people at all different levels of marketing. As Scobbie explains, the goal was to give the scheme necessary rigour and ensure it was grounded in experience.

The name Unlocked was inspired by the mission to drive access to enter an industry where often it doesn’t just feel like the doors are closed, but bolted shut.

“We all know it’s a ‘Who you know’ industry and talking about getting your foot in the door and it’s like, but who’s getting their foot in the door? What does that person actually look like? We as a player in the industry wanted to use the idea of it being a doorway, but not just for one side,” says Abel.

“We are very aware that people want to come into the industry and get that exposure to the industry, experience in the industry, but also the industry needs this exposure to talent that they have not had access to before.”

Sending a message

Applications to Unlocked are based on passion rather than experience and prioritise applicants from low-income backgrounds and non-white ethnicities. Interest has already exceeded expectations, attracting 100 applicants in 2023 and 313 in 2024. In year one 100% of applicants were either non-white or came from a low-income background, while 86% of the last cohort met both criteria.

To raise awareness John Doe Group goes out to schools and universities, as well as community groups and networks such as Proudly Black and Scottish. There is currently a minimum age of 18 for applicants due to the nature of the clients the agency works with, but there is no age cap to ensure the programme is as accessible as possible.

The “multiplier effect” is what matters, says Scobbie, who explains that while John Doe Group could have gone it alone, building a network of likeminded partners felt like the natural way to make a bigger difference.

“I’ve been really lucky in building up a brilliant network through my career,” she reflects. “Then it was a lightbulb moment when I was like: ‘OK, I never had those contacts starting, but I do now. So how do I use them in order to affect change?’”

We have lots of people talking about ‘DEI really means a lot to us’ and we’re like: ‘OK, well, what are you doing?’

Pam Scobbie, John Doe Group

A group of seven partners, including broadcaster STV, the Leith Agency and Scottish brewer C&C Group, joined forces with the John Doe Group to offer eight paid internship in 2023. In year two, the agency started working with 17 partners to deliver 22 internships across Glasgow and Edinburgh.

The ambition was always to make something happen and while Abel recognises it would have been amazing to come out the gate with 50 internships and a large array of partners, the idea was to be intentional and work with a strong group. The process of developing and running the programme is deliberately open and iterative.

“You can go fast, but you can’t go far and that’s why the internship, the process and the programme itself is really built on collaboration and then building onto that with the partner model where we work with different agencies,” Abel explains.

The internships and workshops run from June to October, after which the interns receive final feedback from partners ahead of a celebration wrap party. The whole programme has been designed to be holistic and help the participants become work ready. Again, this approach was inspired by personal experience.

“I’m bit of an extrovert. I can just throw myself out there and make things happen, but with my peers and my friends, they’re not those personalities. They don’t have those characteristics, but they’re incredible, super smart people,” says Abel.

“I realised the industry’s not set up for anyone who doesn’t have a set criteria of characteristics and that’s not fair. There are super smart people in so many different roles in marketing who might be a little bit more reserved, who might not be able to just rock up and have a conversation with X, Y and Z. So how do we serve those people?”

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This approach means, for example, showing the interns how to post on LinkedIn to announce they are participating in Unlocked, a platform many may have never used before.

Due to the level of interest a workshop programme was launched offering upskilling programmes across Glasgow and Edinburgh to anyone who applied to the scheme and wasn’t awarded an internship, known as the Unlocked Network. Run by the John Doe Group and its partners, the 12 virtual and in-person upskilling sessions cover topics from PR 101 and events management 101 to how to raise your profile on LinkedIn.

The results are tangible. So far, seven are in full and/or part-time employment with programme partners. A talented photographer who joined the network even photographed the last Unlocked wrap party.

John Doe Group hired its first intern Elroy Elvie, now an account executive at the agency, who transitioned from being a dancer and chef into the ad industry. Scobbie describes Elvie as a “creatively gifted person” the agency would never have found without Unlocked.

For Scobbie, everything comes back to belief and if you don’t believe an industry welcomes you, you’ll never break into it.

“It’s about just sending out those messages. There can be a path for you here and even if we’re just unlocking that door and cranking it open just the tiniest bit, it’s sending the message: ‘Come in,’” she reflects.

“It’s that multiplier effect. The more of us that can say the same message consistently and show that we genuinely want change to happen – not just talk about it, but back it up with action – the more we do that we will succeed and change the game.”

More than talk

For Unlocked the year starts with partner recruitment. The programme previously enjoyed “strong recommitment” from year one to two and has already had several approaches from new companies wanting to join for year three.

The onboarding process is geared up to ensure any prospective partners can meet Unlocked’s inclusion guidelines and commit to what the programme stands for.

Of course, not every business shares the John Doe Group’s commitment to inclusion. As Scobbie points out, with DE&I schemes being rolled back and budgets cut, the “mask is dropping” for some corporations.

She recognises other businesses might feel like changing the industry is a big ambition but insists you can make a difference and collaboration is key.

“Mercy said it perfectly, you can go fast or you can go far, and you go far when you collaborate and you pull people together,” Scobbie states.

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The programme is self-funded by the agency, which has invested a six-figure sum in getting Unlocked off the ground. While John Doe Group and its partners have come a long way, they are clear the scheme can only scale with support – meaning businesses need to start matching their words with action.

“We have lots of people talking about ‘DEI really means a lot to us’ and we’re like: ‘OK, well, what are you doing? How are you going to genuinely affect change beyond having one or two people that look different or come from different backgrounds in your agency? Are you truly committed to that difference?’” Scobbie asks.

The next chapter for Unlocked is sharing the blueprint with the wider industry and getting other businesses nationwide involved, even if it just means committing to a single internship. Whether it’s working with Unlocked or another programme, Scobbie believes businesses should either “make the momentum or join the momentum, or do nothing and just own that.”

While the team see significant momentum behind Unlocked, they regard the 300 plus applications in year two as just the “tip of the iceberg”. Despite the clear need for such a programme, there are real fears Unlocked could be stunted if the wider industry doesn’t lean in.

“The opportunity feels boundless, but it has to be more than talk. It has to be people actually committing to it and it’s not committing a lot,” Scobbie adds.

“The multiplier effect of everybody together will send the right message out to the industry overall to affect a broader change, but it has to be more than talk.”

Marketing Week’s Opening Up campaign is pushing for the democratisation of marketing careers. Read all the articles from the series so far here.