The Bottom Rung

Another opportunity lost in this sea of insanity.

2006-05-30T16:16:00.000-04:00

I opened my gmail today to find an e-mail from George, my old professional development teacher from Seneca, and there's a job opening at Arnold World Wide for an account coordinator (experience preferred, but not mandatory). That's me, right? That is SO me, and while I read it over twice wondering if I should e-mail this guy (rpalombi@arnoldworldwide.ca) my resume, I decided to close the e-mail.

What am I, stupid? For some reason, I can't bring myself to do it because it's only the beginning of June and I still have two more months here. Certainly, I should wait til late July before I start applying for jobs.

It's not only a matter of ethics though. I just don't feel like I've learned enough here to start job hunting. When I go for an interview, I like to feel like I have solid experience backing me up, and right now, my experience is still very limited. Of course, I could probably stack up to any of the kids applying for the Arnold position - especially with my internship, but a part of me still wants to stay here.

When I left school, George told me to stay in interactive and specialize in it, but I don't know if I actually want to. If they did offer me a position here, I'd probably still want to look around just to see what else this industry has to offer. Even internally, there are many opportunities avialable including agency side, direct marketing, and branding (!). I would love to go into branding, but who knows if I'm qualified.

Would this be easier if I had a university degree? If I had a marketing or a communications degree, would I have so much trouble deciding what I wanted to do next? Probably not. But I'm a free-wheelin' kind of girl, and I think I'll wait til July before I start looking for something else. I made a committment to Adam and I'm going to keep it. Hopefully, there will still be some exciting opportunities left by the end of the summer. Fingers crossed!

Whose side are you on?

2006-05-29T16:38:00.000-04:00

When I decided to go into the creative advertising program at Seneca, I always knew I wanted to go into business, but no one in the program ever thought of me as the account management type. I come off as totally creative - I wear band t-shirts and buttons, I'm an artist on the side, I love artsy films and books. I guess to people who don't know me, imagining me sitting in an office running up status reports and collecting competitive data was probably a bit of a stretch.

But just because I'm a creative person with creative interests shouldn't entirely cut me out of the business side. In fact, having so much creativity in me allows me to look at business solutions in a pretty unique way that adds depth to my perception. To many people, the business side of advertising consists of account management and media, everything else is left to the creatives. I don't have a lot of experience in agencies, but I knew that a lot of groups at school worked like that. The account side students would write the creative brief (which often lacked any deep insight) and hand it over to the creative students to interpret however they want. In many cases, especially because we are all very new to this, the strategy and the executions did not match at all!

This doesn't happen here. At the start of every project, both business and creative people gather together for a communal brainstorm because both sides can offer their own strengths to the mix. It's really cool to be a part of one because those boundaries between business and creative are completely gone. There are no criticisms for anyone being not creative or not strategic enough. We all sit together eating and playing with think-toys (bubble blowers, magnets, rubik's cubes, yoga balls), just shooting off ideas. Soon, it becomes one big conversation where we all chip in to add to other people's ideas, making them bigger or better, the energy and momentum can be palpable at times.

Even a little intern like me can feel comfortable enough to participate in these kinds of meetings.

At school, I tried to do similar brainstorm sessions with my group members, but for some reason, we were usually too insecure with our ideas to come up with very many. Too often, we would sit back and hum-haw in our own little corners until we came up with THE BEST idea we could and then bring it forth. Who knows how many brilliant baby ideas we through away before they had a chance to get out of our mouths?

If I could do it all again, I'd force my group members to not write down a thing (of course ONE person has to be writing down all the stuff, but no one else really needs to) and make them do activities like word-association and real-life examples until we have pages and pages of brilliant crazy ideas! In my opinion, this very beginning stage of advertising is the most exciting part of any campaign. This is the stage where great ideas are born.

In the Beginning...

2006-05-25T17:12:00.000-04:00

Let's start with a little something about me, The Intern. I just graduated a 2-year Advertising Program at Seneca College, Toronto. It was seemingly long and strenuous, and consisted a great deal of substance abuse to numb my frustrations over something called The Big Book, presentations and the niggling little voice in my head that kept screaming: I NEED MONEY. GET A JOB.

Surprisingly enough, despite my desperate desire to make money (that being, of course, the main reason why people go into advertising because it sure can't be for job security or spiritual satisfaction), I decided to take a full-time, unpaid, summer internship at a little agency in downtown Toronto.

So far, I've been moved three times (and will soon be moved again into a little closet next to the kitchen with The Other Intern), sat in on a lot of meetings, and drank a lot of free coffee. Today's meeting was an overview on Blogs - something everyone in my generation should be familiar with, but apparently only a tiny fraction of corporations have any involvement in the Blogosphere.

This, by no means is a corporate blog. God no, they don't even pay me here. What got me thinking was the various necessities needed to make a successful blog. I'm going to paraphrase the presentation, but basically, one needs the following things:

1. A point of view.

My point of view is that of an advertising intern. This is the bottom of the barrel - even the cleaners are more important than I am. But I'm not the only one, which leads me to the second necessity:

2. An interested target audience.

There are thousands of advertising students, current and recently graduated, who are going through (or will have to go through) this long and arduous journey of simultaneous boredom and facination. Boredom? Yes, boredom. I'm not saying that the ad industry is boring - I'm saying that being an intern is sometimes very fucking boring. And that leads me to number:

3. Frequent posts and updates.

There are times in the day when my head is fuzzy from looking at too many site metrics reports or what have you, and I want to do something to take my mind off work, even for just a little bit. I don't smoke, and going outside is perilous because I work very close to Queen Street West, and being an unpaid intern means I don't get to do any shopping this summer. By growing this blog, I will have an advertising-related activity that I can do at work without feeling too guilty.

4. Transparency.

I vow to post anything interesting that happens to me (that's industry-related) no matter how stupid it makes me sound.

This blog is a memoir that I want to share with all the other advertising hopefuls out there - and I know that there are many. Whether you're in creative or account side, we have to help each other out because it's a tough business to crack. I'll post as much useful information (industry events, job or internship opportunities, tips, or even contacts) as I can.

The current format is pretty basic and blah, but give me some time to develop it as we go along. Thanks for joining me on this journey!

Note: I apologize for the jargon. I can't help it, it's EVERYWHERE!