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!