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.