Interview with Mr Loukas Petrounias

I had the opportunity to meet and talk with a graduate of the Ad&Pr Lab that joined it just the second year of its function, Mr Loukas Petrounias.

Mr. Petrounias currently works at Piraeus Bank, in the Customer Experience and Loyalty department. He is responsible for making sure that the bank’s customers are content with the services and interaction with the bank, how the bank can improve each customer’s experience, as well as the digital and website/social media work.

As I said, he studied at the Lab just two years after its establishment, the years 1994 to 1996. He remembers how new everything was, the enthusiasm, and how experienced and dedicated the people who offered the students any sort of guidance were.

He mentioned that as a young adult, he was not sure about what exact direction he wanted to follow career wise, and even now, he still is a little unsure. In the department of Media Communication and Culture, he was quite interested in communication and journalism, especially since journalism was greatly evolving during that period. When he started following the lab, and was introduced to commercial communication and advertising, he became very interested in this field.

When he graduated, he had not yet fully decided if any part of communication and journalism was what suited him. But, his first jobs were related to journalism, since he worked at a newspaper, radio channels, (Vima, Rock FM) and state-run television. As he emphasized, it was a time when all students graduated into an environment with a lot of opportunities and job vacancies.

He remembers a lot of the projects that were assigned in the lab, and his team which was called Monopoly Advertising. They had even made business cards! He remember a visiting professor, Mr. Stavros Leousis, who owned a large advertising company,”SOLID”, which was one of the oldest ones in the field. The project that he assigned had to do with the promotion and advertising of insurance services. Each group in the lab was assigned a different role, and the one which stood out, won. Mr. Petrounias’s group was the one who won the contest, and he also ended up working with Mr. Leousis in the future. Out of the 17 years that he has been working in the field of communication, 11 of them have been at the company of Mr. Leousis.

The prestige and the exposures that the university offered helped him very much, and to return to the university in order to talk to the students, guide them, provide internships and projects for them, was something he really wanted. During the years of 2012 to 2015, Mr Petrounias worked as a mentor for the third year students in the “Strategy Lab”, which was later taken over by Ms. Lina Kiriakou.