Fourth Week June 27-30

Monday

Monday brought more positioning (hey, i'm not complaining. I love this stuff.) I entered in some new publications for Nissan/Infiniti. I also continued tracking down checking copies. This is such a hastle for the agency; it seems like there should be a more efficient way of retreiving the ones that the reps forget to send. Maybe I'll get to work on figuring that out?! I also did more work on our intern project. I took on the print section of the media plan and used crosstab information to determine the magazines that axe users read most.

Tuesday

On tuesday I started out doing positioning for the apple girls. I then attended a "Town Hall" meeting. Susie Vye, a person high-up in OMD west coast, had just returned from Cannes where the Lion awards for advertising were being held. OMD USA did not win any of the awards, or even make the short list, but her account of what happened was still extremely interesting. The US in fact had very few advertising (creative and planning) submissions win. The known reason for this: We simply have too many regulations as opposed to European and South Eastern countries. We can't do things like cut into programming, be extremely shocking, lower the temperature to 4 degrees celcius in a movie theatre. Those countries can. She also attributed the loss to anti-american sentiments that have apparently hindered the states preformance since the Bush administration came to office. Anyways, Susie showed us one of the winning campaigns for the category of broadcast. In the midst of a soap opera, the network drained the color from the program and left it in black and white for awhile. A few minutes later a screen flashed with Clorox bleach and a message reading "Do you want your color back?" A great idea, but evidence that something like this could not be done in the states. For more information on this awesome awards undertaking go to: http://www.canneslions.com/winners/media/. When asked why the agency continues to pay money to go to this festival that obviously doesn't appreciate American efforts fully, Susie replied that OMD's goal is to be creative and shocking and winning one of these awards, regardless of the regulations, would be proof that the agency is doing just that. Later.... I had one of my team members send me a grid of different rates for magazines and began putting together a chart so that the interns could use it easily to find prices on all the top publications for male axe users.

Wednesday

I finally learned the difference between gross rates and net rates! The gross rate is given to everyone for buying ads in magazines. The net rate is for all recognized agencies and is equal to the gross rate X .85. I also learned that the "rate base" is the gauranteed circulation of the magazine (to the advertisers) as opposed to the actual circulation. I made another binder and made my way to lunch with a client from good housekeeping (my third rep meeting so far: I went to one with PC magazine and a new launch: Cookie before.) They brought us lunch and chatted about how good housekeeping could benefit epson if epson were to advertise its printers in the magazine. The topic of conversation was the 'good housekeeping' seal that advertisers (three or more times) get to use on all of their products. It was interesting to see how these friendly reps tried to maneuver their way into the good favor of my group. Members from the epson team attended and explained that the new epson ads were not going to be printers, but special ink used for trade practices more than in-home. This would mean Good Housekeeping wouldn't be the best choice. The Good Housekeeping reps seemed dejected and we left the meeting with a 'maybe' in the air. I felt only slightly bad for them as I left the meeting carrying a plate of sandwiches and munching on a brownie.

Thursday

Went to a playstation 'status' meeting and learned the difficult logistics behind coordinating work between different strategy teams (playstation, nissan, apple, etc..) and specialized groups like mine. Communication problems were the focus of the meeting, and although I didn't understand much of their jargon, I left knowing that playstation would take care of insertion orders for the enthusiast publications while the print group would take care of those for consumer magazines. I also went to a meeting with a maxim rep who was a little disorganized, but again very nice and excited to tell us about the added value that comes with advertising in maxim and participating in maxim events.

Friday

The whole office is off today and monday for the fourth of July weekend!

Third Week June 20-24

Monday

I started out the day with another meeting with the interns regarding the intern project. We cemented our project subject as axe body spray and then divided up work from there. I volunteered to look into axe's nearest competitors, visit their sites, and determine what promotions the competing products have previously done. Our competitors are: degree, speedstick, right guard sport, and old spice. I continued with a positioning grid for the Nissan/Infiniti team and compiled a list in excel of the missing publications. I also continued with my magazine launch endevor and spent most of my day finding websites online for respective magazines that had been launched in 2005. I was surprised to find that most magazines had web pages for their corresponding publications and that these websites were actually interesting! I found myself getting caught up in the content of these sites.

Tuesday

Tuesday I worked for the "Apple Girls" in the print group. It was more positioning charts, but with apple positioning the task is to label the nearest ad and also label the cover. More importantly, I was told to search for client edit (for example: an article on ipod accesories.) If I found client edit I had to summarize its impact. I continued with my axe competitor research and found some interesting games and promotions on the competitors websites. I also helped with a survey that we sent out to the entire OMD side of the building (150+ people). This survey was meant to aide us in collecting further information about the average axe user.

Wednesday

In the morning I had one of my first deadlines. One of the girls I work under needed a summaries on important print events from two weekly media newsletters. These were the Min and Delaney reports. I spent my morning reading up on media events this week, picking out the ones that would have a significant effect on the print world, and then summarizing them in my own words. Later I spent time contacting some playstation reps that had still failed to send checking copies. I learned the importance of getting back to reps in situations where I ask them for something! It took me two or three follow-up phone calls to get reps to send the missing copies over. Following this, the interns went to media training with the rest of the lower level people at the office. In the meeting we played a jeopardy game in which we broke-up into teams and tried our best hand at defining media terms often used around the office. This allowed me to get to know more people and answered a lot of my questions regarding what different terms meant.

Thursday

Our third lunch and learn was today. We met with the investing group to learn about media buying. This was by far the most interesting lunch and learn. Even though they gave us a rather basic account as to how they negotiate prices in broadcast and radio, how they do ratings, and how they follow up on it all, we asked a lot of questions after they finished and found out about the "real" world of media buying. For example, they told us that all insertion orders (for broadcast) are due in to major networks at least two weeks in advance. But a little detective work later on in the meeting showed us that this in fact is something the OMD investing team has learned to work around. I also had to make some changes in the positioning grid for nissan/infiniti.

Friday

I've come to realize that fridays are always slow days! Half the agency is out on "summer fridays." Needless to say I didn't have much to do on this day, but I spent the time I had working on the intern project. I found various articles from the washington post and newsweek that outlined the recent succes of axe body spray and the advertising strategy behind it. I also made a binder (fun, I know) for the playstation/epson part of the print group and continued trying to collect stray checking copies.

Second Week June 13-17

The internship picked up a lot in the second week, so I haven't had time at work to do this post until now. Never-the-less, I will try to recall the work I did on my second week on the job!

Monday

I was notified that my group would be using the POV (point of view) I wrote on the Robb Report Vacation Homes magazine for their client, Sea Island. This came as good news, as I spent a lot of time revising it and did not want it to go to waste. Later in the day the interns got together for training so we could better use office research tools for our intern project. We learned how to use "crosstab," a program that is basically a database of surveys on just about any product you can think of. You can then take a basic demographic (like age) or a complicated opinion (like "is generally happy about their standard of living,) and compare it to all the people using the product. The program then brings up a results page and one can read the index number (chances of the product occuring in this particular group of people) and vertical and horizontal percentages, as well as just numbers. It's pretty interesting and a fun tool to use! At this point in time we were still thinking we would do our intern project on an energy drink brand, but after using the database, we learned that the market is still pretty small. We would have to find something with larger numbers.

Tuesday

I worked on more positioning charts. These were quickly becoming my favorite thing to do. They allow me a chance to flip through so many different publications and at the same time teach me terminology (TOC = table of contents, bleed = color runs to the end of the page) and it all fits neatly into an excel chart. Also, I was doing Nissan/Infiniti positioning this day, so I had to start learning about different Nissan brands and their competition so I could check to make sure the negotiated position in respect to the competition was correct. Its all very interesting and I am becoming quite the car expert! I started two more projects today as well - one involving retreiving checking copies of magazines and the other involving researching new magazine launches

Wednesday

Continued with the magazine launch project. Little did I know that this would be quite the undertaking. My task was to go to such sites as magazineyellowpages.com and magazinelaunch.com and find new magazines, then put them in a chart on excel with name of publication, publisher, launch month, genre, a short description, and email. The problem was that the sites did not have all the information I needed so I would have to find the magazine's website and abstract information from there. It was quite the process and my chart grew to over 130 new publications in 2005!! I was amazed at the amount of new magazines starting up and got to learn about what is classified as a "lifestyle" magazine as opposed to an "epicurean" magazine. I also helped contact reps for magazines under the Harman JBL campaign (IPOD accesories) to make sure we would receive checking copies of those magazines for the client! I learned how important it is that nothing is missed when working with the client.

Thursday
Today was the day of the second lunch and learn as well as another intern training. The second lunch and learn showed us the logistics of a strategy team. The epson team (printers) went through their positions as media planners and broke down their different tasks as well as how they worked together. In each team there can be any number of assitant strategists and strategists. There is usually only one supervisor and then one account manager. It was interesting to learn about how media planners work their way up the ladder. Later that day we had adviews training, which is another research database that includes all budgets for companies. A person can search for brand, product, company, or larger subsidary and find breakdowns of ad spending for a given period of time. We got to learn about how a media calendar year is different from a regular calendar year and how different companies allocate their advertising money (whether it be in outdoor or in print, etc...) The interns met after this meeting to finally determine a product after searching both databases and seeing how much information we could gather on our ideas. We decided to do axe body spray/deodorant for men after much deliberation.

Friday

The company allows "summer fridays" for all employees. You choose four fridays to take off. I took a day to learn about the benefits of working for OMD!

First Week June 6-10

Since I did not discover this assignment until today, this weeks account of my work at OMD media planning and buying in LA will not be as detailed as the weeks to come. But here it goes anyway:

Monday

The infamous nine interns met in the "gatehouse" of OMD and were then given the tour. This office is actaully a peice of art donated by CALarts indefinetly to OMD and TBWA/Chiat Day ad agency. There is an indoor basketball court, a "central park" area with live trees and crickets, and dogs are allowed in the office!

But back to reality, the nine of us met with the HR director for introductions and then were introduced to our seperate teams. My team is the Print Group and I went to work right away at doing positioning charts for them. Since the print group is expert on all advertising in publications, one of their major jobs is to keep track of the positioning of all ads and make sure that they are correct. This requires using excel and filling in a complex chart as well as knowing different advertising/publication lingo such as C2P1 (cover 2 page 1, ads are place directly inside the front cover of the magazine) and PC4B (four color bleed, meaning an ad using the four basic colors that runs to the end of a page with no white rim). In completing such a chart the competitive sets of the client are also needed. These are the nearest competitors to things such as apple music and Nissan Altima. These are just two of the clients I filled out positioning charts for throughout the week.

Tuesday

Again I did positioning charts and learned about insertion orders. These are the orders the print group places for ads in magazines. They specify the type of ad (like PC4B), the position of the ad, and whether it should precede a competitive set. As a general rule they ask that the different advertisers do not put a competitor within six pages of their ad.

Wednesday

I received a project to research a new publication called Conde Nast Johansen's Hotel Guide. The print group was trying to decide its legitamacy due to the fact that hotel's pay to get in the guide. I wrote a mini-essay on my findings (I found other reviews of the book/magazine in The Washington Post.) I also spent the day calling reps to get magazines sent for positioning charts

Thursday

This was the day of the first Intern "Lunch and Learn." We learned about the research team (experts on research tools) at OMD called ignition. The company uses a media planning strategy they are very proud of called checkmate which we also got a crash course on. We then received our intern project to be presented in August. The nine of us were to choose a major company in the US and establish/write an entire media plan on it, then give a presentation. Our group met and decided on Rockstar energy drinks.

Friday

My major project on Friday was to write a POV. This is a point of view...basically the print group's expert advise on a publication. I was reviewing Robb Report Vacation Homes and had to retreive demographics, comment on background, editorial, and distribution of the magazine, and then write a recommendation for the client, Sea Island, based on my findings. This was by far my hardest project yet, and it took several revisions to get a final result.