THE DAIRY: second week as intern

PLACEMENT DIARY: SECOND WEEK 24/03/2014

After the mad rush of the first week getting everything sorted for the DNCC (chamber of commerce) e-business conference event, I thought the week would start of a little slow, however I was wrong- there was still some work to do on the design work and ensuring the proofs were signed off ready for print. The beginning of the week was mostly spent liaising between the clients, Shaun and the printers. Although on an extremely strict time plan, I had to negotiate with the printers to delay a day whilst the last bits off copy was sent in and proofs were finalized. This was quite a frustrating process- there was a lot of emails sent asking for changes to the artwork, this meant that myself and Shaun ( the designer ) spent hours amending to ensure the client was 100% happy with the product. As Nigel the MD was scheduled in for business meetings on the Monday and Tuesday it was really my responsibility to ensure everything was complete and with the printers. As 5 o'clock hit on Tuesday everything had been sent to the printers and completed ready for the event on Friday which I was to attend (huge sigh of relief). I received positive feedback from all the team members on the Dairy and felt that I was integral to the success of the project- definitely a feeling of achievement to overview and contribute to the project from start to finish.

The second half of the week was spent concentrating on Camloc which is a manufacturer of gas springs- which have been working with The Dairy for just over three years. Nigel gave me the opportunity the meet Andy Hubbard, the marketing manager to help work on his marketing communication plan for 2015. This was hugely insightful for me to overview the time plans which are used to guide the marketing communication objectives within the company- taking into consideration workload and budget. I was asked to spend some time working on amending the plans to reflect the changes made in the meeting, so that the account manager and client could clearly see their progress and remanding marketing budget for the year.

During the week Notts TV- a new local TV channel came into the Dairy for a meeting to discuss their exciting new advertising prospects for local businesses. Notts TV has been awarded a 12 year licence to broadcast a TV channel on Freeview Channel 8 – launching in May 2014 with the vision to produce high quality content relevant to local audiences. As the Dairy is a creative marketing agency it is important to remain up-to-date with the vast number of advertising channels available for it's clients and as Notts TV is a brand new opportunity for advertising it is more relevant as ever.

On Friday (my last day) I attended the DNCC's Ebiz Conference which was what I spent most of my time working on throughout my placement. The event was held at the Nottingham Belfry and was packed full of members of the commerce exhibiting their services for attendees- it was a fantastic event with some great speakers from the industry covering social media to SEO. It was the perfect way to round-up my first industry experience - networking with other businesses and individuals in the industry.

Nigel at the EBizConf

Seeing first hand how a busy creative agency works on a day to day basis has helped to develop many of my marketing skill-set further, whilst meeting/networking with some great people. It's been a fantastic start to my journey into industry and I'm looking forward to seeing what the next few months has to offer.

THE DAIRY: first week as an intern..

PLACEMENT DIARY: WEEK ONE 17/03/2014

As part of the second year structure on my course Fashion Marketing and Branding, I am able to source my own placement for the last term. Luckily enough I managed to secure two places for the ten week term- the first being; The Dairy- a marketing communications agency based in Nottingham. Having not worked in the marketing/ advertising industry before it was difficult to know what to expect, however after completing my first week I can safely say I have acquired many skills which will help my with my own future career development and also met some lovely team members.

On my first day I met Nige the Managing Director, he ran through 'standard first day info' and quickly moved on to brief me on the project which I would be overseeing for the first week- this was a fantastic opportunity for me to work closely on a live project with real clients and to very strict deadlines. The client I was working with was the DNCC (chamber of commerce)- they were organizing an business networking event for the 28th March and needed a range of brochures, banners, badges and posters designing and creating. Nige quickly advised me that this was an extremely big task for such short notice, but assured me we could turn it around. Shortly after Shaun (the agencies free-lance designer) came into the office, over the week he would be working in the studio creating the brochures on inDesign and I would be working very closely with him to ensure all content and copy was delivered on time. After a morning of 'welcomes' and 'briefs' we were straight into the work. I was assigned my own workstation and was asked to effectively source and manage the content from the client for the brochure- this required me quickly adapting to the task and thinking on my feet.

Over the course of the week and as the deadline loomed-(we had to get everything in the printers by Monday morning) I  found myself carrying out varied tasks and really taking ownership of the project. My main skills and tasks included:

• Monitoring incoming emails and requests from clients and handling incoming telephone call
• Building spreadsheets for costs of printing- helping me to understand the basics behind the finances of a business
• Chasing up clients (the DNCC took their time delivering parts of the content) 
• Liaised directly with the designer, gaining an insight to working with deadlines and the speed of which they work. It was interesting to see how the designer was briefed with the marketing/creative problem
•  Sorted out content and copy in a logical way for the designer to drop into the brochures. 
• /Generated orders in preparation for the event
• Sourced images for designer from creative database
• Learnt the benefits of having cloud based computing with Google docs, Zoho, jobbags and the server system. (All unique to the Dairy)
• Checked brand guidelines for some of the logos for the content of the artwork we produced.
• Attended morning meetings with Nige and Shaun to monitor progress of project (working to a tight schedule)
• Proof read content 
• Blogged for the Dairy website- which you can view here: http://www.thedairy.biz/current-intern-zoe-stroud/

The list of skills I have learnt in the last week are extensive and it really has provided me with a deeper insight of the industry. Deadlines are much stricter and the clients own a lot of power in terms of the final product. During the first few days I also met Fiona Geeson- one of the account managers and 'PR lady' as we like to call her- most of the account managers take sole responsibility on the projects they work on and it was good to see strong relationships building between clients and the agency, with some clients around for over ten years! The week has been very motivating for my future career and it has allowed me to think about roles such as: account managers which previously I may not have considered. After my busy, information-filled week, I am looking forward to a large glass of wine and relaxing over the weekend!