Today at centerline I was provided with an opportunity to see what I could contribute to a marketing agency. As soon as I walked in I met with another woman from the accounts department who pretty much immediately gave me an assignment to work on.
She asked me, ” How are you with writing?” I said I loved it, and she told me about a project she’d give me a shot at. The project, without breaching my agreement of confidentiality, is for editorials and press releases for a pretty major event. Really what she asked me to do is come up with tag lines and phrases to place over the pictures that had to embody a few specific themes. I went to work on those for about an hour and composed a spread of around seven different options. For this project I really had to think about how I could best encompass the themes of passion and strength into a brief and powerful message. Later on I showed her what I came up with ( which was just a touch nerve-racking) and received really amazing feedback. In fact there was one specific tag line that I came up with which she noted she found really beautiful. Upon her request I sent those over to her to review again, and so who knows, maybe I’ll end up having it selected! For the second part of the day I met with Tyler an ACD ( associate creative director) who was just heaps of fun. We walked around through all the departments as he recreated a typical day in his life, and just chatted to everyone! He explained that his job as an ACD is about 80% oversight and 20% doing, as he creates creative visions and concepts, but also has to oversee the entirety of the process from start to finish. Because he is always so busy and constantly moving around he showed me his preferred method of transport around the agency- a razor scooter. I sat in on a couple of meetings, one being a team process meeting and another being a client review and then before i knew it the day was over. Another cool day down!
Evie
Day three at Centerline has definitely been one of my favorites so far. The environment here continues to be both welcoming and fascinating, and I’ve woken up every morning looking forward to the day ahead of me. I’m starting to become less and less dependent on my NAV to get here which is a plus! Today I’ve spent the day with two really wonderful women: mackenzie ( hopefully I’m spelling her name correctly) and Valentina, who work in the writing and accounts departments respectively. My time speaking with mackenzie was really wonderful as I spoke to her about her education and the course of her career. We discussed for a while the difficulty of being a writer in a corporate environment and the struggle to implement her own creativity and voice into sometimes quite formal pieces of work. She noted that her job was to ” find the human” in the product, and to ensure a way to make the pieces connectable and resinate with an audience. Over the course of our conversation she also opened up to me about her relationship with her writing and the occasional cut and dry vibe of the industry. She said how quite often it takes quite a thick skin to be a writer in an agency, as scripts can get rejected and sent back incredibly easily. For a writer, who pours everything she has into what she creates, it takes a strong ability to focus on the final product and satisfaction of the client rather than her own feelings. After lunch and more chatting I met up with Valentina from the Accounts team who’s job seems to be another challenging one. Valentina ultimately works as a project manager, so her job demands extreme organizational and customer service abilities. She essentially works as the overseer of the marketed product from the moment she comes in contact with the client to the final sending off of the product. Through her complex schedules that she showed me in 2nd picture above, she organizes every single step of the process. While organizing and facilitating the production process along with the writing, film and animation departments, she simultaneously communicates with the client. Her goal is ultimately to figure out exactly what the client needs, ( the message they want to convey, their target audience etc.) communicate that idea to the creative teams, and ensure that the final product is perfect before its sent off to to the client. Long story short- if I ever hear that someone works in accounts again I will instantly have a massive amount of respect for them.
CA Work Experience Program 2016 