Hello, Ascentium!

This is me, looking all sleepy/excited on my first day of interning at Ascentium.

I have been under the watchful and helpful eye of Mason West, a copywriter and the COLAB liaison here at Ascentium. My first two days have been full of meeting people, seeing how the office works, sitting in on meetings, researching for real projects and even contributing on some brainstorming session for, again, REAL projects. If you had any doubt in Colaboratory's authenticity, get yourself out of my blog.

These first days have really got my wheels turning on what this industry is about, and more specifically how I function within it. Here are a few snippets from my thoughts thus far --

NOT EVERY AGENCY IS THE SAME
I came in Monday morning assuming there would be some sort of all-office meeting to sync-up projects, talk about office happenings and such because that was what always happened at Turnstyle, my former internship home. Wrong. Ascentium has so many different people all under one roof--creative directors, designers, consultants, project managers, web-types, ad-types--and not to mention so many different projects running at once, an all-group meeting would ultimately just bore some with the others with project happenings that they don't ever touch. That's not to say Ascentium doesn't function without cohesiveness. Everyone seems to operate in these self-proclaimed teams. For example, my desk is located in what is known as the "Creative Cave."

Fellow Colab'er Erin Davis Tweeted the other day about 'learning the language' of an agency. I couldn't agree more. I need to go into each agency with a clean slate, without expectations of how they operate and what their culture is like.


DESIGN VS. AD/MARKETING
To some these may seem like tangent worlds. To me, they seem very far apart. Even on the opening day of Colab at orientation I felt pretty out of place discussing media strategy and promotional events as compared to my norm of brand identity and color schemes. I do miss the rub-off creativity you find in a design office that is full of people sketching, sharing photos and chatting about pretty packages they saw at the grocery store. However, I am really loving the feel of working at an ad agency that is upstream from the design world--meaning, being where the concepts are conceived versus on the end where they are executed. Ideas are happening in the Ascentium office so rapidly. It's one creative brief to the next brainstorming session, basically end-on-end all day long. I like that.


TO SUCCEED, INTERNS NEED TO ASK QUESTIONS
Lots.


ARE PERSONALLY RELEVANT CLIENTS NECESSARY TO PERSONALLY ENJOY AGENCY WORK?
I don't really have any finite revelations on this one. I suppose its more of a question I'm posing to all of the marketing professionals reading this blog. Am I going to feel fulfilled by this project management work if the portfolio consists of cool, but personally not-so-stimulating businesses? Will I have to do work for projects that entail art+bikes+traveling+community+coffee etcetera to really get passionate about this work? I find myself generally very excited about the process of the work I've done so far in this industry regardless of the client, so I've found myself wondering what the relevancy of the client type really is. I like wrangling info and people and ideas all into one cohesive product and I even like to think I'm pretty good at that--but, does there need to be more than that there for this to be my career path? Come on wise elders, help a intern out!