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!