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.