The Advertising Experience: Visiting An Agency
There are two great events that really highlight the whole Newhouse experience for Advertising students: the fall New York City visit and the spring New York City workshop. Our professors have plenty of experience in the world of advertising, but sometimes I find myself in class thinking, “I just want to try it myself!” We had a great opportunity to test our skills in a different way last week (March 23) when Professor Sheehan took us up to 360i for a full-day workshop. This was one of my favorite parts of the Master’s program so far and a true stress-test.
If you’re thinking about joining a future Newhouse Advertising cohort, deciding between advertising and another major, or just wondering what a NYC agency might be like, read on.
360i is known best as a digital advertising agency. Although basically any agency can be considered a digital agency nowadays (you just have to use the internet in some capacity), they were one of the first bigger agencies to focus on digital executions. Advertising enthusiasts may have seen their #WeighThis campaign for Lean Cuisine, but they are most famous for their Super Bowl work for Oreo, “You can still dunk in the dark.” We walked into 360i’s high-rise at 9:30 A.M. and eagerly awaited our chance to prove ourselves to people who know advertising and aren’t required to see us every week.
How it began:
The morning was similar to one of the Eric Mower Ad forums that Newhouse offers throughout the semester. We had a presentation from a seasoned 360i veteran, Mark Avnet, who had a long and unique journey into his role as a 360i trainer/developer (including owning a hypnotherapy business). He reminded us that there are a lot of ways to be successful in the advertising world without becoming the next David Droga or Don Draper. He also reminded us that services like Uber and AirBnB are more than tech companies — they indicate that the world is moving toward a sharing economy in many different levels. Integration is more important than property, which will impact advertising going forward. He also gave us a breakdown of one way to think about advertising in the clients perspective:
- What is important to the brand? Think about the client’s history, image and values. If you can use your work to extend the brand’s promise, they’ll get on board.
- What is important to the people? There’s a certain audience that uses your brand more than others, but there’s usually a deep reason why. Sometimes it can be about price, but it’s often more emotional or intellectual than that.
- If we had a magic wand… Here is the part that might make you think differently in your strategy and execution. Every idea Mark showed us had a “If we had a magic wand” concept. How you position this part is especially important to clients. You’ll see pretty quickly whether they’re on the same page.
After a few more words of wisdom, we were split into teams and given a hypothetical situation for one of their brands. We had all of 4 hours to read through our brief and create a potential campaign for our client that we would present to a panel of 360i employees. The pressure was on!
How I got through it:
When you compress the typical project schedule of about a month down to about 4 hours, there’s zero time for reflection and procrastination. I’ll take you through our process.
Research: My group split up to uncover any corner of the data world that we found interesting or helpful, reconvening after 30 minutes. The key we learned at this stage was to find one or two interesting things and make sure they’re believable.
Positioning: Every client wants to see a breakdown of the market and a SWOT. Those are easy to throw in, but the time-consuming part is finding a big problem or opportunity that you can expand on. Shine light on this “new problem” that they never knew existed.
Name your target: In our brief, we were given a market that is already sold on our product, but we had to find who our target should be. Just a hint, it’s not the people who already love your brand. You need a new target to generate greater sales. Find them, name them, tell the client what they’re like.
Strategy: You found the problem, you know your person, now what? Mark gave us a simple way to approach this part in his talk. You can either generate a lift in sales or extend the brand’s promise.
Execution: When you know the strategy, it’s time to get creative. Since we were at a digital agency, we had to suggest a digital/technology-based execution. Mark gave us a great tip for executing: don’t exactly make it about the technology. It’s fine to use a new, groundbreaking, hyped-up technology in your execution, but it should be about the brand more than the tech. If you’re just innovating for the sake of innovation, you’re not doing it right.
We have 10 minutes left and no presentation plan: I never recommend finding yourself in this situation. However, if you’re in this workshop (or if procrastination got the better of you), I’ll share what we did. The easiest way to make it look like you’re on top of everything is to have your team members talk about the section they did. Don’t worry about order or jumping around, the top priority is looking like an expert and speaking confidently. If you know the most about what’s on the slide, it’s your slide.
Overall, the trip went well and we all had good reviews on the core of our projects. If you don’t think you can get a project done in 4 hours, put yourself in that spot and see what happens.
