Runtime 24min
Before my stint at OgilvyOne in London, I was fortunate to get some experience stateside at the Zimmerman Agency in Tallahassee. I was an intern with their media department and also on the account management side for their ClubMed client.
Here is a journal I found from my time there in the Fall of 2007:
Working at the Zimmerman Agency has been a great experience. I feel as though I have learned many useful things about myself, my abilities, and how the real world workplace really is. Throughout my journey I feel like I have transformed into something I never thought possible. Striving to succeed and pushing myself to do things that I thought I would never be able to be. Whether it was waking up regularly at 7:30 in the morning or completing big projects on my own. While interning with the Zimmerman agency I was able to see multiple aspects of how an advertising agency works and feel like I have a much better grasp on the industry as a whole.
After being accepted into the Zimmerman internship program I was placed into two separate departments, the media department and account management. On Tuesday, I was to work with account management on the ClubMed account. I was excited about this because it is one of the bigger clients that Zimmerman currently has and because I have actually visited a Clubmed Resort! Working with a client that I had encountered as a kid over ten years ago was really exciting to me. Looking back to when I was at the Clubmed resort ten years ago, I would have never imagined that I would be working with them by helping to do their advertising.
Working with account management was not all fun and games. I quickly learned that there were numerous due dates on all kinds of projects. Be it brochures, calendars, menus, room keys, baggage tags, collateral, and pretty much everything you will see at a Clubmed Resort. I thought it was awesome that all of that stuff was designed and made at the Zimmerman agency. These objects must be carefully proofread and checked for the tiniest errors. These objects being created are constantly being updated and fixed. I learned that if you do not check and recheck your work then something could go to press with the wrong information. This error could cause minimal damage but on the flip side could have the potential to lose the company thousands if not millions of dollars! Luckily, I had very skilled people working above me, guiding me throughout this process and helping find the copy errors that I might have overlooked.
The most important and useful thing that I have learned from the Account management side of advertising is how to construct a competitive analysis. The competitive analysis is a crucial part of the advertising industry. Other agencies are always trying to one up their competition in hopes to steal away their client. I worked on constructing these analyses for primarily print media. I would find magazines that we ran ads in, as well as certain pertinent publications that our competitors might be running in. After searching through these magazines I would pull all the advertisements that we considered to be in competition with Clubmed. I would analyze the overall effectiveness of the ad.
To do this was not an easy task when I was first given the assignment. After some excellent constructive advice from my supervisor, Jamie, I was able to effectively scan though these ads. He told me to look for a couple of key features. These features include, who the targeted demographic is, the overall theme and tone, and how well the ad space is used to convey their message.
Another important skill I learned was how to be more organized. While filing is not the most exciting job in the world, it is important. It is an important aspect of every business because keeping hard copies of everything you do can protect you from losing precious data. Before working at the Zimmerman agency I was very disorganized. I would throw all my papers and important documents in a pile on my desk and when I had to find something it took a considerable amount of time. Since working at Zimmerman I have changed my whole system at home to be more efficient and I keep certain things in certain folders.
While working with the media department I learned the ins and outs of how to buy and plan media calendars. Some people are turned off by the media buying and planning aspect of advertising because they believe that it is just a bunch of number crunching. I definitely would have to disagree with that statement. There are so many facets of the media department that it blew my mind. I think that the media department is the upmost important, besides the creative, aspect of advertising. Media buys are specifically researched and targeted to reach a maximum number of potential customers. Without people specializing in media purchases so much money would be wasted on useless advertising.
I was surprised to learn that these buys are so carefully tailored to each of our clients. Certain clients would target certain demographics. For example we would run our Ritz-Carlton client in higher end magazines where the readers were more affluent and had certain household incomes. I was able to sit in on Rep meetings where magazine representatives would give us their sales pitch on why Zimmerman should buy as space from them. From that inside perspective, I learned how segmenting actually works in the real world and techniques on how to execute.
While in the rep meetings, a lot of technical jargon was thrown around. I would write these things down and ask my team after the meeting to clarify. I learned the important lesson that if you are new to an unfamiliar environment and ‘language’ the only way to get a handle on the jargon was to ask somebody. Everyone made me feel really comfortable and told me that they were in my shoes back in the day. They told me not to worry and that once you hear these things everyday it becomes almost second nature.
I came to find out that different departments had certain perks. The media department is regularly treated to a nice lunch by the representative after they have given their pitch. They are also privy to about perks like complimentary subscriptions to the reps magazine and sometimes even small gifts as a token of their appreciation for considering them for ad space.
The account management team gets very different perks. For Example, if you are working for a hospitality client you may receive extremely discounted rates on staying at their resorts. Account managers are also very frequently being flown out to these exotic resorts for business meetings directly with the clients.
While working with the media team I had a chance to see how online media buying works. Online media buys are becoming more and more prevalent in today’s industry and there are less and less print ads being bought. Some say this could be a problem for the newspaper industry! I got to see how website ad space is valued by how many unique visitors frequent the site each month. I also learned about how certain sites are better to advertise on than others. For instance, if you were buying space for a client like fisher price, you would want to buy the ad space on a website that is highly trafficked by children and mothers of young children.
One of the biggest things I will take away from this experience is that I have made so many self-improvements while working in this professional environment. Every Tuesday and Thursday I would get up, shower, shave, get dressed in my business casual clothes and head on down to work at the early hour of 8:15am. A year ago, I couldn’t even schedule a class before noon without missing it! It took some getting used to, but I’m confident in my ability to be where I need to be and getting there on time.
I also learned a great deal about the power of a resume. Many co-workers looked over mine and helped prepare mine for future use. The Zimmerman Agency also helped my writing skills increase dramatically. With the sheer number of emails that I had to send each day of work, I had to make them sound as professional as possible. Because I was representing the Zimmerman Agency and not just myself, I took the time to carefully read over what I had written to make sure it was professional enough to send.
I also learned the importance of a planner. Before my internship I would try and go off memory for the things that I had to get done for that day. With multiple job due dates and new information being imparted on to me on a daily basis, writing things down was a must. This, I feel, is of huge importance in the business world. Missing a due date for a project could mean losing a client or even worse your job. I can remember in my first week of working at the agency and Curtis Zimmerman getting very upset with one of his employees because they dropped the ball on a particular job and we lost the client.
Even though a lot of these tasks seem like minute details, I strongly feel like they will make a huge difference in the long run. I tried to take something away from everything I was assigned to do. At times it was hard to see why I was doing some of these tedious things for no pay. But, I would just remind myself that it is for the advancement of my experience, knowledge, resume, and hopefully career.
When I first walked into the Zimmerman Agency for my preliminary interview I was impressed by how the inside of the building was filled with modern art and furniture. Once I started, I noticed how great and unique the working atmosphere was. The office culture at the agency was extremely friendly and a comfortable place to be working in. I think an office like this is where I would like to be in the future. I think that my personality goes well with the advertising industry mentality. It is not a strict rigorous daily grind and allows for some of your own creativity and input. This is the main reason why I wanted to get an internship at Zimmerman in the first place. I wanted to see if my expectations about this industry would hold up and to see if I was the right fit for this line of work. I wanted to learn this information before I graduated and was locked into a job, just in case it wasn’t the right fit!
I had a chance to talk with several employees that have been working all over the country at different agencies. Some of them worked at extremely big agencies in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and New York City. I learned that from agency to agency there are certain differences on how things are done. Most employees said that Zimmerman is by far the best place they have ever worked. Eventually, I would like to try and work for a large agency in a big city. I think that this internship has gotten me one step closer to that goal.
I feel as though I completed every task that was assigned to me in a timely fashion and to the best of my abilities. I am truly grateful for having the experience I have had at the Zimmerman agency and wouldn’t trade it for anything else!
For the summer of 2008, I am trying to get yet another internship with OgilvyOne in London, England. I want to see how the advertising industry is like abroad because one day I hope to work with global companies. I hope to take what I have learned from the Zimmerman agency and apply it to my work overseas. I feel like I have a certain competitive advantage for my professional advancement thanks for my experiences thus far in the world of advertising.
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In this short episode Lawton has a conversation with Lewis Howes author of LinkedWorking: Generating Success on the World’s Largest Professional Networking Website.
They discuss various aspects of how using LinkedIn as a personal branding tool is extremely important in the professional world.
(sorry in advance for the not so great audio quality! Great content makes up for that!)
Runtime 12:30 min
2:20 Taking legacy of Lawton Chiles Governor working with children and implementing with Worsttofirst.org
3:00 1 one mistake about using linked in is not making messages personal
3:40 Connect on a personal level
4:38 Answering Q & A questions to build connections with people. This can make you an opinion leader
5:22 Provide the best answer for questions. This leads to people clicking on profiles then onto the website.
6:00 Ask thought provoking questions. To get free advice from industry experts
7:06 Linked working book on amazon
8:00 one of the best ways to be known in your industry is to host events.
10:38 Follow Lewis howes on twitter. Check out Lewis’s Linkedin Profile.
11:20 Ustream sound quality SUCKS! Sorry about that listeners. We are working to resolve these issues
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1:00 Video marketing best practices
1:35 Tip 1 : use the metadata to its fullest advantage: Title, descriptions, keywords, related terms,
3:00 Copywriting tips for title descriptions
3:15 Look at what others are doing and if they are getting those views than check out the metadata in the blue more description tab
4:14 Use italics and quotes around keywords in title
5:00 Can’t have too many keywords but keep it relevant towards your vertical
5:40 Use bottom results of google for keyword tips
6:00 Thumbnail optimization – pick a thumbnail that will grab attention of viewer
7:02 Make sure your content is fresh and that it is staggered.
8:00 Youtube is being leveraged as a tool to ultimately send traffic to your site!
8:20 Youtube Secret TIP!!! Live hyperlink in description. Making it easy to send traffic to your site.
9:33 Watermark your video in the corner of the screen. So if the video is embedded away from youtube you are still getting your brand out there.
10:32 Youtube Secret Weapon.com
11:00 Implications for b2b use of online video
11:13 Webinars like hubspot.tv
12:05 Relevant content is key if you are going to pitch anything at the end
12:25 Will it blend – by Blendtec
13:25 The whole goal is to make it shareable AKA Viral
13:55 There is no secret sauce to viral videos. There are multiple ways to do it.
14:53 Stay genuine. Fake virals have a bad backlash if consumers feel duped.
15:30 OfficeMax Viral commercial
16:20 Viral tip: use subtle branding…
16:30 Ways Brands Leverage Youtube
16:40 Youtube Brand channels
17:18 In-video PPC. Not a good idea to leverage as it annoys consumers
17:55 Youtube annotations: Samsung Instinct. Series of videos where you choose your own ending.
19:00 Annotations are the perfect way to be engaging to the consumer
19:20 Leading the consumer through the experience. Call to action at the end of the journey to convert.
20:30 Branding on the sly through the Samsung instinct viral video
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DATE: 29/07/08 – 01/08/08
It is almost the final week at your internship, what tasks/responsibilities to you have to wrap things up?
I have finished all my projects that can be finished. The adwords campaign is an on going optimization process. That is never finished, until you stop the entire campaign all together.
How will you turn over your work assignments/projects to your immediate supervisor?
The Adwords editor is very easy to use and you can export all your data in an .aes file for anyone to use/modify.
During your experience, what kinds of changes have occurred in your company/organization such as staff, location, etc that might have affected your everyday routine? If there were changes, how were those managed?
There have been a number of people to come and go. I think that is normal in the agency life though. The same seemed true in my previous internship. I have been told numerous times that it is easier to work your way up in the industry diagonally moving from one agency to the next than to move up vertically in a company.
Over the course of the next 6 – 12 months, describe what goals or plans you might have that relate to this internship experience. These goals may be personal, career, or educational.
When I return to FSU in the Fall, I have planned to implement a test run of my own consultancy for the FSU American Marketing Association. The plan for the program is to further my experience in the field and to get other members involved in a direct, hands on way, so that they can grow their own marketing skills.
The main idea behind the consultancy is to help other on-campus organizations and hopefully area non profit orgs to better market themselves to potential members/donors. I feel this would be far more beneficial to non profit organizations instead of just have 10 or so our members show up and help for normal volunteer help.
Hopefully, the idea is bolster their involvement in an area of interest and they will volunteer anyway. I think we could use the power of few to greatly increase awareness of certain community issues. I have been creating the documentation for this program while abroad and will be ready to start it in the fall. It also will increase the AMA member involvement/retention rates by providing them with a sense of meaning and goodwill, while simultaneously growing their marketing skills and making them more attractive to future employers.
I have also contacted several employers trying to find a job. I have 2 companies that are interested in talking with me when I return to Tallahassee and another that is up in the air whether they will offer me a part time job or not.
Other than that I plan on studying for the GMAT. I took it once before and it was HARD. So preparation is definitely in order for me to get into a good grad school.
Once I graduate I plan on continuing into Grad school because I have just had my dose of real life working for the last 3 months! I would like to stay away from it for a little bit longer. While fun, it can be trying (especially if you are not making any money).
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So I was listening to an episode of marketing over coffee with John wall and marketer and avid Buddhist James Connor.
They were going over the main points of James Connors new book, The Perfection of Marketing. 
One of those points got me thinking…
That point was that many companies and marketers make a fundamental mistake on how they go about pushing their products.
James Connors explains that yes maybe your product can do this, that, and the other but the customer doesn’t care about that. They care about the core function that is the selling point, or what he coins the sales moment . Once you find this sales moment, you don’t have to barrage the consumer with all the various benefits that the product or service will provide. You need to paint that one mental image of their life being better by having your product.
In fact if you throw up all of your product benefits into their face too early they are going to become weary of your desperation or just not care. Grab that single thing (the light bulb if you will) that they are looking for and start your marketing efforts there. After you cross that threshold you can start feeding listing more benefits.
He also makes another great point: Do you choose to buy something the first time you see it? No of course not.
Its not until what he says to be at least 6-9 brand interactions/expsoures that you even begin to start this thought process. So spend your budget appropriately and don’t blow it all on a fancy TV spot. Touch as many bases as possible as long as they are viable.
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DATE: 07/07/08-11/07/08
Monday- I have the fortunate opportunity to be enrolled in a digital media certification course. The course has 10 different modules and will be taking place over the next month. Once I have completed it I will have a certification from Ogilvy! How cool is that?
The first module was today and was entitled ‘Reaching consumers through providing relevancy’. It basically touched on what I have already written about numerous times. The more relevant your marketing is the the consumer the more they are willing to bite. In the digital age we live in today it is far too easy for the consumer to switch us off and go to the next channel/brand/medium… whatever it may be. With that being said, providing something relevant to the consumer will give them a reason to stick around. Now how can one provide relevancy? Well there are a number of ways in which to provide content tailored to certain individuals.
Providing personalized products is one way in which marketers are increasingly leaning towards, especially in the clothing/shoe market. You can now go online and design your own shoes from a huge variety of styles. It can even go as far down as to personalize the text on the show to whatever message you would like (minus ‘Sweatshop’ read on more to find out about that here….)
The internet is jammed packed with user created content, so why shouldn’t brands be jumping in there with them? (providing they remain transparent) Another example is Kleenex, where they are now allowing you to personalize your tissue box with a picture of your choosing. Another good example would be M&Ms where you can now get your candy personalized with your name on it (for a hefty price…. but hey, you get the point).
Not only do they give the user/consumer some say into what your product looks like, it also gives a kind of social currency to the consumer, who can now go out there and tell their friends about this cool new feature some product has. Adding this value or social currency through personalization (added relevancy) to your brand can be a hugely effective WOM (word of mouth) marketing technique. This can grab you a huge amount of exposure and free press.
Another way to add relevancy to your brand is to add in some kind of utility to engage consumers. An example of utility added to a brand that Ogilvy recently did for that was the Castrol performance index . This site was build for the 2008 Euro cup which is huge over here. On the site you can search for player’s stats, game stats, the current standing, and compare and contrast them all (plus numerous other features). This site was very well received and added utility to people lives who are futbol (soccer for the yanks) fanatics. It gave them a reason to engage with the Castrol brand without having to go out and buy their oil.
Tuesday- We had our BT email deliverability audit meeting at BT in Holborn. I hadn’t been to that office yet and it was less impressive then their main one. The meeting when off without a hitch and it was basically educating the BT Tradespace team on the best practices of email were. I think with all this repetition of what best practice in email is I have an in-depth idea of what works and what doesn’t. Maybe when I get back to Tallahassee someone will be able to use my skills and maybe I can get paid!
Wednesday- On Wednesday there was another Digital Edge Module of the training program. This one was focused around providing consumers with richer experiences, specifically online. It tied in well with what I have mentioned above about adding utility.
Melanie Ferguson, Head of Creative in the interactive department, put on the presentation. She described the different types of banners that can be purchased for the online medium and how they are changing.
These banners are regulated in size and by how large of a file size they can be. This has been a limiting factor for producing good engaging pieces in the past. However there are ways in which you can get around these limitations and make something fantastic. One way is to create rollover banners. This is when the user rolls their mouse over the banner the ad becomes interactive and can do a lot of cool things. One of them was done by Volkswagon where you could scroll over the square ad on the side of the screen where it featured their newest SUV.
Pictured here: 
This ad is really cool and is just one of the examples that Mel showed us.
The way these ads are done is that the 20kb max is loaded up when the page is loaded and the rest of the file size is loaded in the background while the person is browsing.
Another cool one is a website called www.knickerpick.com (semi-NSFW). It features women’s undergarments that are available for purchase but before you do you can choose an interactive model that fits your significant others body type and see what they would look like in it. I think this will be the future of online clothing with everyone having a personal scanned body image to model the clothing.
Thursday – My family came into town to visit me! I was at work until about one and then we went out to lunch and I showed them around my office and canary wharf. Unfortunately my boss was out of town on Holiday in Switzerland so he didn’t get to meet my mom/mum.
Friday – I took the day off to show my family the tower of London and some other touristy things!
Gaining a global perspective and increased cross-cultural awareness are two major goals for students embarking on an international study/internship experience. Participating in the internship has provided an extraordinary opportunity to immerse one’s self in a different culture from a specific perspective, the work place. What have you gained as a result of the internship that further enhances your global perspective and cross-cultural understanding? Please draw upon specific examples.
I think that I was pretty open minded towards other cultures when I came to London. However, I think that because of this experience I have even furthered that understanding and realize now that the world is a huge place with so much to offer.
The most eye opening experience I have gained here is going to speaker’s corner in Hyde Park on a Sunday afternoon. Here is where people of all different cultures, races, and religions come to debate who’s opinion is better and/or ‘factual’. I love listening to the other people’s point of view and don’t think there is any other place in the world like it.
The interesting bit is that most people would agree in Americans being arrogant and thinking they have a privilege over others. I can see both sides to the argument and think that a lot of people perceptions about America come from looking at our president and superimposing that image onto that of the people. I mean that is what a president represents, is it not, someone chosen by the people as the best person to lead the people? Unfortunately I don’t completely agree with that statement, although it would be nice.
I can vividly remember being in speaker’s corner and hearing negative things about America that I have never really taken the time to think about, nor did I care. Now I am seeing things in a new light. Not so much in a negative one, but one where I can see both sides to the arguments. One side being spoken freely aloud by the random masses and the side that I brought over with me deeply ingrained in my mind.
My outlook on things has changed slightly and I strongly feel that being stereotyped as loud and arrogant is not fair. On the flip side I came over with stereotypes of my own deeply rooted from my years in America. How fair is that? I love living in America and is truly is a land of opportunity, if you are willing to seize it. However, I don’t think it is the only land of opportunity. The world is a great big place with many wonderful lands that I would like to travel. A lot of people seem too stuck in their own way to come into another culture and embrace it, which leads me back to a quote I like ‘the overzealous love of ones country leads to the hate of another.’ This hate, perhaps a strong word, is what leads to the prejudice of others and therefore a lack of understanding for who they really are. People are just people no matter what religion, race, or creed. They are just people.
More to come Stay tuned!
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9. Click on Wordpress
Super Easy to set up with the one click install of wordpress!
- You don’t have to install all the software that comes in the pack. I just installed live writer.
- Free easy to use FTP software
- Screenshots made easy
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With the recent proliferation of green marketing (not necessarily the marketing itself but company’s going “green”) it seems it is becoming more and more of a ‘me too’ movement.
Hey “company X” is going green! Lets go buy their stuff! Wrong
I just watched an E-surance commercial that boasts their greenness by how they contribute to replanting trees. That is a good thing, everyone can agree. However, at the same time the company in question is a car insurance company. Now, doesn’t their product, insurance, enable people to drive? Well cars (most cars anyway) aren’t very environmentally friendly. If they were trying to do something green they would stop selling insurance and take all their money and form a crazy lobbyist group to ban cars or promote electric ones (hyperbole).
There seems to be a clear disconnect from this philanthropic marketing tactic and the companies underlying actions.
In my opinion, I think it is imperative for companies to engage in philanthropic activities to further/foster their companies continued success. However, my suggestion would be to make that philanthropic activity something that relates to the product itself. It wouldn’t work for everyone but it would make people less weary of green marketing nonsense.
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Week 5DATE: 09/06/08-13/06/08
Monday – On Monday we had yet another ESP (Email Service Provider) Strongmail come in and pitch to us. This was an interesting proposal to listen in on because it seemed ill conceived. This may have been due to the fact that our meeting room was stolen by another team and that the Strongmail Rep was ten minutes late! Being on time is one of my pet peeves and has been strongly ingrained in my personality from a very young age by my overanxious mother!
I’ve noticed that these meetings usually start with some form of introduction of everyone involved. The introductions make their way around to me and I admit that I am just the lowly intern sitting in on the pitch! (Woe is me)
The Strongmail platform is one that sits internally in the client’s data warehouse within their firewall, thus making it more secure. However this setup would not work with most of Ogilvy clients because we manage their data and push the emails in-house. One of Ogilvy’s mantras is staying technologically agnostic, meaning we would not want to implement such a system ourselves because then we would be stuck with using Strongmail excluding other ESPs. Leverage over providers is a key ingredient for successful negotiations.
So after Skip explained our technoagnostic (new term I’ll coin) approach to the sales rep from Strongmail the tone of the meeting immediately changed. It was rather amusing to see how the rep shifted from trying to sell us on the product to ‘Hey maybe we can work out some kind of preferred partnering program referral payment.’ To be politically correct we agree to such an idea. Whether or not that will actually happen is yet to be seen.
After the pitch we had some time left over and we began talking about how email marketing is not doing as well as it should be in terms of total budget spending by clients. The reason behind this is that marketing directors are looking at EM as 5% of the total picture. Therefore EM is pushed to the backburner to some junior level person who has no idea how to look at it strategically or who doesn’t have the budget to do any worthwhile strategy planning. Skip brought up this point and I thought it explained a lot about how great ideas sometimes never reach full potential due to upper level management not seeing the big picture and stifling the project/medium from the get go.
Later in the day Skip introduced me to pivot tables in excel. Oh how exciting! The pivot tables are actually a pretty cool function in excel that I never knew existed. The new naming campaign that we have been working on is going to need to be set up in a pivot table to see results quicker. The basic idea behind it is that we set up the pivot table so we can aggregate the data for how effective each emailing campaign was, without doing the report manually.
Tuesday – I compiled a huge deck of slides together for our ongoing C & G rebranding project. One of the tricks I have learned here is to work smart, not harder. There have been many case studies done on rebranding efforts that Ogilvy have undertaken in the past. This information is all in past PowerPoint presentations ready to be reused to best serve our particular client. I compiled the slides into one show that was about 340 slides (WAY too long). From there, we slowly but surely cut down the presentation into about 45 slides (and two short movies). The presentation is going to be at 8am on Thursday morning and our allotted time is about 45minutes.
The other thing I did on Tuesday was met with Joe, who is on the BT email team with me, and Neelum (a UF grad… Booooo) about a cool new idea Joe had. He had an idea to add social book marking tags to the bottom of the BT emails, giving them a potential to become viral (viral in the marketing sense). They look like this:
Basically once these are added into the email, the receiver has the option of sharing the message via another portal like Facebook, digg.com, del.io.us, and myspace. It is a simple but genius idea that I think could work, if the offer in the email is relevant/good enough. Definitely a good idea to test out and I have never heard of it being done before. Who knows maybe it will become an industry standard someday.
Thursday – Was the City & Guilds pitch at 8am in the morning at their office. I was so excited to see it that the early hours did not bother me. Skip, Mick and I met up for coffee and/or tea at 7:30a.m. to go over the deck of slides and get our stuff in order.
The pitch started out with the four case studies of past brand transformation stuff that Ogilvy has done in the past. These cases were about Dove, BP, Cisco, and AmEx. The BP case study I think held the most relevance for the presentation because it was about how BP consolidated Amoco, Arco, and Castrol back into the BP brand with the newly invigorated name/slogan ‘Beyond Petroleum’ instead of just British Petroleum. This case was important because this is the same issue that C & G faces with their other brands. They want to consolidate these brands back into the City & Guilds’ long standing name but do so in a credible way.
The next part of the pitch was the bit about convincing the C & G marketing staff that if they are going to undertake this rebranding strategy then they are in good hands with Ogilvy. The ‘safe adventure’ mantra, that Ogilvy lives by, explains that we have the experience and network/resources available to make this thing happen and work. Skip explained that this was of vital importance to demonstrate because Michael Osbaldeston, C & G’s brand manager, had been through a rebranding process before with Royal Mail (UK’s version of USPS) and it failed miserably. The negative effects of the Royal Mail rebranding disaster cost them millions of pounds and was probably sitting at the forefront of Michael’s mind.
The next part of the pitch was the process and how we could implement this change or at least come to a decision whether or not to move forward. The main idea behind this is to have a two part workshop which Mick cleverly entitled ‘Meet the Customer.’ Meet the customer is the first part of the half day workshop where we would bring in the key stakeholders of the company (like the CEO, CMO, and other marketing staff) and bring in the key customers of C & G from all different levels. The key customers of C & G would be students taking qualification tests all the way up to principles administering tests and so on.
During this workshop they will get the people to come in to a neutral environment and talk about what they truly think about the brand. It is very important to understand what your customers think about you from their perspective. Many times marketers can get so caught up in the mix of their own business that they have a myopic view of what there brand stands for. This single viewpoint could be completely wrong from the consumers and that gap can be deadly to an organzation.
The second half day workshop is entitled ‘Stakeholders go, no-go.’ This session is held just with the stakeholders that I previously mentioned. During this session the key learning’s from the first session will be discussed in great detail. This will give an informed decision on whether or not that the rebranding strategy should be implemented.
I think the presentation went well and I hope that C & G decides to at least explore this possibility. This seems like the best way to go about a huge project like this.
Friday – On Friday there was a workshop put on by Kent Wertime, from the Japan office on his new book entitled Digimarketing. The book is a comprehensive guide to the new world of digital marketing. The landscape of media is rapidly evolving into an increasingly digital format. This is causing a lot of traditional forms of media/marketing/advertising to rethink their old approaches to reach the technologically advancing world. There was a lot of talk about the emerging mobile markets and how Japan and Asia is years ahead of the rest of us in the mobile marketing arena.
In Japan they are using mobile phones for much more than just calling, texting, and using the mobile internet. They have the technology in place where they can use their cell phones as mobile wallets. These mobile wallets are just like credit cards and can simply be swiped in front of a (for example) a soda machine and it automatically charges their account and out pops a soda. They are also using QR codes, which is a more advanced version of standard barcode. QR codes can store up to 400 times more data than a standard bar code and therefore marketers can use them for a lot more things. One example of how QR codes are being used is in outdoor print posters, where the code is displayed in the corner of the ad and people can scan it with their mobile device. Once they scan it they could be automatically directed to the advertiser’s website or be given a coupon to use next time they are in the store.
The coolest part of the meeting was when he announced that everyone was getting a free copy of his book and I got it signed afterward!
What personal and professional qualities do you feel have been worthwhile to your work place? What areas do you think that you want to improve upon? What skills/qualities have been most successful in your opinion?
Working at a large office the number one quality one can possess is being sociable. Since there are so many people here it is obviously impossible to meet everyone but my central group of co-workers there is no shortage of people interacting on more than a humdrum business level. The work culture is very important in the way that it motivates employees to not only do their job but have a personal connection with that job because of the environment around them. Once these two things combine and synergize (Buzz word!) the level of productivity and overall job satisfaction is attainable and this positive vibe feeds back into the culture and fuels its continuation/growth.
One area I could improve upon is managing tasks better. I have a couple different things usually going on at the same time and can get easily distracted between them. I will work a little bit on each one and when the task becomes increasingly difficult I will jump to the next. I feel in doing so, I lose that stream of consciousness that is required to accomplish these tasks in the best way. So I find myself rereading things and starting that thought process from scratch. This is one thing that I am working on. I think a way to accomplish this is by closing all other applications that I am not using at that moment and get things done.
Have you developed a more clear sense of your co-workers and how they function within the work environment? What similarities and differences do you continue to observe between the US and UK workplace?
I do feel like I have a good sense of what my co-workers do. They are in charge of all of BTs DM/EM. They function as a team and everyone seems to get along very well. They are always joking around whilst doing work, which I think is cool.
The difference between working here and working in my last internship in the US is that Ogilvy has a massive learning/training database for anyone to use. At my last internship I would be lucky if I learned something in a weeks worth of working there. Here at Ogilvy I have an overflow of knowledge coming at me from every angle which makes coming to work not just a job but something fulfilling.
How would you describe the level of satisfaction your co-workers feel about their jobs?
Well without having to pry and ask these questions directly, I would say that most of my surrounding co-workers do enjoy their jobs. Perhaps it is not their dream job but it is probably somewhere in the scheme of things a stepping stone to where they want to be, whether in this agency or another.
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WEEK 4
Tuesday – On Tuesday I got to go to a meeting with skip out of the office. The meeting was at a company called City & Guilds. C&G is a company that offers certification and qualifications for over 600 different professions and sectors. They came to Ogilvy with an interesting problem. They are a company that is pretty well known in the UK and has been around for about 150years. However, they are most widely known for their blue collar certification practices even though in more recent years they have a substantial increase in the amount of professional white collar training certifications as well. They want to reposition their brand as a business training and consulting solution and not just a place where plumbers come to get their qualifications. The goal is to increase awareness of their relevance to other people not just in the service industry.
At City & Guilds, we met with Michael Osbaldeston, their group brand manager, and the rest of the C&G marketing department for about an hour. We discussed the possibility of extending their brand onto their other practices which is called ILM (Institute of Leadership and Management). They want to know if their long standing C&G brand has enough breadth to spread out onto their other sectors. This would be a much cheaper solution than starting a new brand from scratch because C&G has an existing presence and no initial awareness campaign would be needed. The issue here is that sometimes brand extensions can be detrimental to the master brand.
C&G wants to bring their brand, which has an old stuffy feel to it, into more of a modern, foreword thinking brand. Mick, who is the lead account planning consultant at Ogilvy, also came to the meeting. He was describing how every brand had some emotional draw to it. The trick to repositioning the brand is to find out what that emotional pull is in the consumers mind, and then play to it.
I think this is a really cool project to be a part of. Seeing how a brand is repositioned is right up my alley and will be great for future reference. As we were leaving the meeting we left through the revolving doors and immediately asked what Skip and Mick thought about it. Skip told me some valuable information that I will keep with me. He told me “Woah woah woah, slow down. Wait at least until we are around the corner to talk about what you think.” I thought that this was kind of odd but I listened and waited another couple of minutes to reengage in the conversation. Skip told me that you should never ever talk about a client meeting until you are far enough away where they won’t over hear you. He told me that in the past there have been instances with people who had bad mouthed a client and the client was in earshot and they lost the account. Seems like common sense and it is but I was just super excited to see their thoughts on the brand repositioning.
Later in the day I met up with Shailen, an AmEx Digital team member, he has been working on a new adwords platform for the AmEx site that will interact with customers while they are accessing their online billing information. A side box much like googles adwords will be placed in the side margins. The widget will feature dynamic content that is tailored around that person’s purchasing habits and could also tailor the content by what time of the day it is (for example restaurant information in the midday and retail sales in the morning/afternoon). Since AmEx has all of this information readily available this should prove to be a good boost for internal revenue by effectively selling ad space through this platform. He had me do some research as to whether or not this would be a good idea to place within the secure part of the site. I came to the conclusion that if the information is relevant and the widget could be opted out of, then it wouldn’t be too intrusive. I have been noticing more and more that RELEVANCE is a key component to marketing/advertising and is directly tied to the bottom line and a companies overall ROI.
Wednesday – I sat in on a meeting where a company called Traction gave the Unilever and Email team a pitch of their ESP (Email Service Providing) software. Ogilvy is constantly contacted by these companies because we have a stance of being ‘agnostic towards technology’ and use multiple platforms across our different clients. The Traction platform integrates mobile, web, and email into one. In doing so, it makes it easier to segment customer information by creating real time profiles of each individual user. It tracks engagement and builds the data at each touch point.
One of the interesting things that this Australian based ESP touched on was a case study done for Cadbury(the delicious eggs). They pushed a 30second tv spot about 7-10times with a simple call to action for viewers to text a word to a CSC(Common Short Code) and then engage back with a text to visit their WAP (mobile web page) site. The spot was a contest for Cadbury eggs. The stats that came back increased awareness and sales for the product. Of course every pitch I have seen thus far only tells you the good things that they can do for your company and never anything about the horror stories, if they have any.
Also on Wednesday there was the monthly agency wide status meeting (which is inventively called ‘WotEva!’ crazy Brits.) At this meeting the head of the agency, Annette King, showed us the creative and strategic plan that just recently won the British Airways account. This win was huge for the agency and will bring in an additional £7 million pounds of revenue. Since this was such a huge win there also was a HUGE party later that night. This was a chance for the BA people to get together with the OgilvyOne people and mingle in an informal setting. I attended the party and met a lot of new coworkers. It was a great time. (Open bar too!)
Thursday – On Thursday I had the privilege of attending an Email Marketing Conference at the London Zoo, which was put on by the DMA (Direct Marketing Association). A single ticket for the event runs at £425! My Boss, Skip, was speaking at the conference and was able to get 2 free tickets for it. It was an all day conference that included breakfast, lunch, and an hour break to explore the zoo! There were six speakers that spoke on a variety of email marketing issues ranging from segmentation and targeting, frequency and timings of emails, and measuring the metrics of your campaigns. I felt extremely lucky that he asked me to join him and very privileged.
Skip asked me to put together a presentation of the key learning points of the conference. I am to present this presentation to the rest of the BT team that had to stay in the officer and actually work. I actually recorded the entire event and have been putting together a comprehensive presentation for everyone to see. It will be my first one here and I am pretty excited about it.
Friday – Friday I had the choice of going to Stonehenge and Bath with the FSU group or coming into work for a brainstorming session for the rebranding City & Guilds project. I obviously chose to come into work!
The session started at about 10:15 and went on until about 12:30. It was probably the coolest thing I have been a part of since I have been here. The entire process of seeing how the freeflow of brainstorming works was amazing. The conversation started out with some joking around about where to start.
Mick, who has been at this for about 15 or so years, started off by restating the goals of the session. C&G wants to refocus their core image into a newer, more modern brand. They also want to know if their brand has what it takes to do this. So the main idea for the brainstorm was to formulate a plan that will not only convince the C&G marketing team that their brand has the breadth to do it but also convince their boss or finance department(however their organization is structured) that this is a worthwhile cause.
To do this we started talking about certain clients and case studies where Ogilvy has done this in the past. They came up with a lot of different examples for this. The Dove campaign for real beauty and the British Petroleum (BP) rebranding strategy ‘Beyond Petroleum’ are perfect examples of brand extension that we are using to convey our message. That message being: if C&G wants to do it for their brand, that they are in good hands with Ogilvy.
Next in the briefing we talked about an Ogilvy mantra called ‘Safe Adventure.’ This is a methodology of thinking used for big mega-brands where repositioning their branding strategy can be very dangerous and costly. The story of the Royal mail rebranding fiasco was brought up. The idea behind safe adventure is that Ogilvy has done this type of brand repositioning before with BP and Dove. So C&G, if they decide to proceed, are in good hands with us.
The last bit to sum up the brainstorming session was the idea to add in at the end of the pitch a pragmatic and focused process in which they can implement this idea. This is also a way for this to convince senior level management to jump on board with the notion of repositioning the brand. This is a costly move and if they cannot convince upper management to buy in there is no way to proceed, so this is a VITAL part of the pitch.
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Another interesting bit I learned about Ogilvy this week was that Arthur Anderson used to be a client of OgilvyOne. Mick was actually working on a rebranding strategy for them before they went bust. He showed me a lot of the creative work from the rebranding campaign. It was well put together and they were near launch when the whole Enron thing happened. A lot of hard work for nothing!
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WEEK 3 of interning at Ogilvy London
DATE: 26/05/08-30/05/08 (May 26-30th 2008)
Work responsibilities- what did you do this week?
Monday – Bank Holiday! Fantastic British invention where no one has to work!
Tuesday – Trip to the Globe Theatre with the FSUians.
Wednesday – On Wednesday I had to set up my Maconomy account to record the hours I have been working. Maconomy is a platform that Ogilvy uses to keep track of all the billable and non-billable hours of the projects that people work on from a day to day basis. Basically everyday each employee enters in a job # and how many hours they worked on said job. The client (depending if they are on a retainer or not) is then billed for those hours. This system is in place to ensure that the client is still producing profit for Ogilvy and that projects are staying within their original scopes.
Later in the day Skip had me working in an ESP (email service provider) platform called Dreammail pulling some statistical information on some of the previous email campaigns from Q4 (4th quarter, which in the UK is January-March) for BT (British Telecom). The data that they were interested in was total amount of emails delivered compared to the amount of emails actually opened. This data is then cross referenced with the subject line in the email to see whether it was product lead, offer lead, informational, or incentivised (the list goes on…). The subject matter in the email is also scrutinized to see which engaged the opener the most and got the most click throughs to the client’s webpage. This information is important and is used for the strategic planning of future email campaigns to make them as efficient as possible.
The second part of the project Skip gave me had to do with a new naming convention that BT’s internal marketing team is trying to implement. Basically it is a 18 character code, each letter and number standing for the different aspects described in the paragraph above. This code is being put into place so they can pull the necessary data much easier. It is consolidating all the data into one resource that can be easily accessed. Not the most exciting job to do but it is helping streamline the analysis portion of the email marketing sector of BT.
Thursday – AxPi (the American Express interactive team) had a status meeting first thing in the morning that I was able to sit in on. It was interesting to see how all the projects had progressed since last week’s status meeting. There was also talk about some possible graphic design work that I could be doing. I take notes at every meeting and in this particular one I heard the term SOW being thrown around. I wrote it down and then got the scoop on what it actually was later. The term SOW stands for Statement of Work. It is basically a document that is created after an agency has won a piece of business that gives a more detailed overview of what the project is and what the specific parameters will be. This is to ensure that the project is properly managed and delegated to the right individuals so that the project does not creep outside of its scope and can be completed on time.
Later in the day a woman named Amy was in town from Ogilvy New York office. She runs the global email insight team that I am a part of. She was really nice and actually took us out to lunch! She was in town for a couple meetings and we sat in on a Unilever email pitch that Skip was putting on.
The pitch was for Unilever to use Ogilvy as its Email marketing solution. The basic idea of the pitch was that email is an underutilized resource in most organizations and it is one of the least intrusive forms of media out there today. (This may sound strange, but most email campaigns done today are through a double-opt in process where the recipient asks for the emails and therefore aren’t considered SPAM.) The email in your inbox doesn’t pop up at you or make annoying sounds like a lot of adverts out there today. They can be troublesome if you receive too many however. But ever since the CAN SPAM Act all email requires an opt-out clause in the message so that recipients can request to be taken off any emailing list.
Later I met up with Jethro again at another Amex meeting and we discussed some email solutions with Skip. Currently AmEx is requesting custom emails for each one they blast out. This is running them anywhere from £15-25k per email. Jethro raised his concerns about how they could be saving money by using templates and just changing out the images. These emails would cost only about £5k to run and would in turn create a better long term relationship with the client because we would be saving them £10k. There was an immediate concern for the immediate loss of revenue of all the emails that Ogilvy is producing for them and that still remains the issue up in the air.
Friday – Trip to Scotland on the Haggis Bus Tour.
Have you received any specific types of training and how does that relate to your work responsibilities? If not, is there additional training that you’d like to receive that would assist you in performing your job?
Sitting in on meeting and see how their work flows is really what I am learning the most from. I also have access to their intranet that is FULL of basically all the information and things Ogilvy has done in the past 60years. I find myself reading up on things quite frequently.
Name 2-3 new skills you have developed and how they might help you in the future?
I have learned that every client is not a good client and that you may run into people who are difficult to work with. This is just preparing me for the reality of the real world work place. The thought of firing a client never occurred to me before this! I thought any business is good for your business but that seems not to be the case.
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