COLAB, Over and Out

About a month out from the COLABORATORY grand finale and I finally feel like my thoughts are cohesive enough to write a blog post in review. Excuse my tardiness, but this beast of an intern program is not so easily summed up in one quick post.

The final blowout event of the COLAB program was the team presentations to Columbia Sportswear. The day was something I never imagined myself having the opportunity to partake in at such a young age in my career. The act of pitching our campaign to Columbia, a prominent corporate brand, is alone an amazing thing to have lived to tell about. I think what was most nerve racking for me was not necessarily the Columbia judging panel, but more so the 20 or so COLAB committee members sitting behind the judges. These COLAB folks are the real deal, the professionals that do these sorts of pitches for a living, our bosses from the last six weeks and not to mention the people we all might someday want to work for if we stay in this industry. There was pressure. For sure.

Photo By Erin Davis / Columbia Sportswear judges.

I think our team really found a lot of motivation in that pressure though, or at least I think I can say so for myself. Getting up in front of that room and spilling out on the table the amazing work Wet Paint did was a total rush. It was not so much about "selling it to client" like I had assumed it would be. Once we got up there and got rolling with our pitch the whole thing turned into this sort of enthusiastic show and tell. We were simply showing off this baby we had made, this adorable little bundle of joy all rolled up into one neat package that we called a campaign. Our group really made fantastic work -- we all were so proud of it which made the pitch just seem like the fun part. All we had to do was show Columbia how much we loved our stuff and how much we believed in it and the rest just happened. The rest being the part where Columbia deliberated for two hours to decide which team's campaign would be named the winner.

From the sound of it the other group, Silo5, had a great campaign as well. We didn't actually get to watch their pitch, as is the nature of agency pitches in the real world. Once it was deliberation time the two groups finally, finally reemerged from our absurd six weeks of head-to-head competition and got to tour the Columbia Sportswear campus as a cohesive group of 10 smiling, not stressed-out interns. The results were out of our hands; we could finally relax. During the break we got to meet Mrs. Gert Boyle herself! Such a cool lady. It was so great to see her in person after all those years knowing her as the Tough Mom from the Columbia ad campaigns.

Photo By Erin Davis / Meeting Mrs. Boyle.

When we returned to hear the panel's final vote, we were greeted with a ton of fantastic feedback which again was something I think none of us interns would have imagined having the experience of at such a young age. Immediate, relevant, thoughtful critiques from a real client -- those 15 minutes were likely one of the most pertinent payoffs of the COLAB experience. In the end Columbia chose our team's campaign as the winner. They had a lot of specifics to say about positives and negatives of campaign as well as some good, broad tips for us. I can't give you, my dear blog readers, too many specifics though. Sorry! Both team's ideas are now full property of Columbia, so we've got some super confidential insider info on our hands. This is good news for us though because if all goes well in the next stages of Columbia's ad planning, we very well could be seeing some of Wet Paint's ideas in full swing next Fall. So. Exciting!

In the meantime, I can show you some very basic pictures of the very awesome book Wet Paint designed for our pitch to give to Columbia as a takeaway. Consider this a teaser/valid proof that we had as much fun with this project as I had been alluding to in my blog all summer.

More pictures of our book in detail can be viewed on my Flickr account.

The long, last day of COLAB was polished off with a lovely after-party filled with beer, snacks, awkward bonding and Voodoo Doughnuts.

Photo By Erin Davis / Awkward team bonding at the after party.

Overall, I can't imagine having spent my summer in any other way. COLAB was an amazing opportunity, albeit experimental and nontraditional. If you are a prospective intern reading this blog (because I know there will be some, as the 10 of us 2009 Lab Rats sure did our fair share of Googling prior to applying), I'd say apply if you think you are adventurous enough and thick-skinned enough to survive an internship of such abnormal nature. It was rapid fire, for sure. We had to be on our toes enough to handle three first days of work, three sets of bosses to impress and three sets of office responsibilities. And on top of all that there came the extra time needed to devote to the Columbia campaign work. After a 9-5 day you'd usually have another three hours of work or so to do on your own time for your team. It is a big time commitment, but with that said, it comes with big payoffs. The amount of experience we all gained in six weeks far surpasses a traditional internship in my opinion and the number of contacts you make during the course of the program is unreal. I have a stack of business cards on my desk that would make any unemployed college grad drool. So, apply if you think you can make the time/energy commitment and know that if you are willing to go all out during the six weeks, the experiences will be a huge reward.

I'm now venturing off into the seemingly "real world" knowing that I do feel intrigued and inspired by this sort of industry. Where I will fall within the mix of advertising/marketing/graphic design I do not know. Through COLAB I think I came to realize that for me the allure of being a project manager in some facet of this industry is rooted in my love for the process. The late night work session with Wet Paint where some one would get an idea which would make another person sit up in their chair and go, "Oh, oh, OH!" Which would in turn cause everyone to start scribbling away in their journals... that is what I really enjoyed. And then the mass translation of all those good ideas into one cohesive pretty package; that's where the good stuff is at. That is what I can see myself doing for a career. Now to just figure out how I want to make that happen... More on big life decisions in another blog post. This one is already proving to be far too epically long.

Thank you a million times over to the Portland Advertising Federation and the awesome COLAB Committee for being adventurous enough to create this weird program and for choosing me to be a part of the second round of Lab Rats. I look forward to watching where this program takes itself and the great things you all will do to help it get there. And of course, thank you so much to Ascentium, Grady Britton and Anvil Media for letting me sneak into your agencies. I learned so much from everyone on your teams; too many great people to name. Apologies for the many questions, drinking a lot of your coffee and building robots in highly trafficked areas. And most importantly, thank you to Jimmy, Jenny, Erin and Lincoln, the most AMAZING intern agency team a girl could have asked for. I was continually impressed with your guys' ability to produce fantastic content all while sitting in my un-airconditioned house. Well done, Wet Paint. Seriously, well done. I miss you all already and hope some day we all can sit in a room again and laugh uncontrollably at absolutely nothing. I really do.

WOO HOO!

we did it.

were done.

we DID IT!

WE WON!!!!

Team Wet Paint walk away with a victory today at the Columbia Sportswear pitch. Silo5 gave us serious run for our money though. Great experience. More blog/reflection later. Right now I'm packing my bag for my 8am flight to Vegas. No joke.

Woo hoo!

Getting a Minor in Google Studies

My third and last agency placement, Anvil Media, has been a whirlwind. As you probably noted by my lack of blogging, things have been busy. I'm already in my second week at Anvil and last week of COLAB!

In the face of the fun, crunch time madness of planning our Columbia Sportswear pitch for this Friday, there has still been time to learn a slew of new things at this agency placement.

Anvil does search engine optimization and social media marketing--two things I'm not even going to try and pretend I didn't Google before COLAB started. This is new territory for me, but it feels good to be this challenged. Anvil has a very lean business structure. Every person in their 12-person team has basically a comparable title to each other which translates to everyone having their own projects, doing their own research, their own analysis and their own pitching. It's really neat to see everyone work together in such a simplified environment. There are even weekly sessions where the entire team gets together and talks simply about cool stuff they've found that week (blogs, conferences, innovations, etc.). The thought being, this keeps everyone in the loop with not only one another, but also with industry happenings.

Don't let the tech-talk fool you though. The people at Anvil are a pretty is lively bunch. The other day, the office playlist took a romping tour of Dragonforce followed by some Gangster's Paradise. Crazy kids, I tell ya.

My basic takeaways from the SEO world so far pertain to client interaction. In my mind, that is really where Anvil earns their money. They take mass amounts of data and statistics and charts and boil it into a very approachable report and recommendations for a client to immediately put into action. Yes, most of their tools are platforms like Google Analytics, Google adWords, etc. that anyone can access, but Anvil's power rests in their expertise of the tools and their ability to immediately get the SEO ball rolling for a company that would normally be dwarfed by that much data.

It's almost as if what Anvil is offering their client base is 1 part concepts/actions and 3 parts education on what they should be doing. I suppose that is the nature of a company dancing in such relatively new territory. The machine of SEO work is moving pretty rapidly, but I can tell just from my short time here, Anvil has a solid grasp on the industry.

Oh, and one of the other big perks of working at Anvil Media; Heather Schwartz, COLAB Class of '08, is employed here. Heather has been a fantastic resource to have around when I think of random Wet Paint questions. And not to mention she's also just a really rad person. Woo hoo, for COLAB alums!

The Oregonian shows COLABORATORY some love

yeah, we are kind of a big deal -- in print and on the web.

It's all about ideas

One of the most rewarding and encouraging experiences I've had thus far during my COLABORATORY experience have been the times when I get to sit in on brainstorming session.

At both Ascentium and Grady Britton I have seen that in the world of ad/marketing no man is left behind. Brainstorm sessions revolve around every member of the team -- designers, project managers, media buyers, copy writers and interns alike. These sort of free flowing, all-out dump fests are so fantastic. The whole shebang is really show to be seen. It all begins with one good idea. I get excited and start scribbling things in my journal, throwing out random stories. Then someone references a seemingly unrelated event which triggers another idea for 5 other people. We all laugh. Someone reads a Tweet aloud. We laugh again. Then there's an awkward moment of deep-thought silence. Then the whole beast gets roaring again and 58 new ideas flush out on to the table, every single one of which can be traced back to the original good idea that the client had that we as an agency are trying to make BIG. Meetings like this rarely happened in the graphic design world--being on the content side of this creative process is great. Gosh. I'm really starting to like this whole creative strategy thing. I really am.

A sharpie rendition of what a brainstorm session looks like at GB.

In the land of Griffins

The COLABORATORY clock seems to run faster than I had anticipated. It's week 3 already and I am no longer at Ascentium. I started Monday at my new internship home, ad agency Grady Britton.


It's an odd thing shifting between internships at such a quick pace. Kind of jarring actually. I felt like I was just getting the hang of office life at Ascentium, finally knew who to talk to when I needed something and even had a few inside jokes under my belt. And then the COLAB wheels cranked a little bit further and it was time for me to move on. I survived my first few days at Grady Britton just fine, obviously, but I think all of us interns will openly admit that 3 first days of work in one summer brings 3 times the first-day-jitter stress. Chalk that up to an added benefit of this program -- our nerves are 3 times tougher than the average newbie.

Grady Britton is proving to be a good fit for me. Among the amazingly friendly welcome I received and the fact that I've already played on the GB softball team, I think what I'm liking most about this placement is the type of work Grady does. Grady Britton has a strong line-up of really great local clients. They even have a grant program they run annually to provide a local non-profit with $25,000 of creative services. Cool stuff all around.

And where do the good people of Grady Britton find all their energy for such awesome work? Well, Ascentium had their coffee robot, but I haven't found such a fountain here at Grady. There's a lot of griffin swag everywhere in the office in honor of the company's logo, but my money is on the well equipped fleet of razor scooters that line the hallway.

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!

my summer with Colaboratory

After a long and adventurous hunt, I have secured the illusive beast: an creative business internship in Portland, OR.

This weekend I found out that I will be part of Portland Advertising Federation's 2009 summer internship program, Colaboratory, serving as one of two Account Managers.

Colaboratory is 6 week program in Portland that accepts 10 junior or senior college students each year who are interested in writing, design, interactive multimedia, account management, production, strategy or public relations. We will be placed at three different Portland ad/marketing/design agencies for three two-week intensive internships over the course of the six weeks. During the six weeks, we will also be divided into teams of five--our mini agencies--and will compete head-to-head to develop a campaign pitch for a local company. Last year's company was Sameunderneath, a local clothing line. We do not know yet who the client will be this year--all they can tell us it is not Nike. The Internet rumors are true--the 2009 Colab client will be Columbia Sportswear! We will be meeting with the director of international marketing from Columbia on our first day of orientation.

Colaboratory's purpose is multi-functional. The local agencies get aptly funneled, highly qualified, eager interns, while PAF promotes young innovation city-wide and the interns get a broader perspective of the market and much more networking outlets. To say the least, it is an exciting program and for that reason and many others, I was highly invested in my application and was elated when I heard I was accepted.

Another function of the program is for the interns to be very public with their experiences to serve as a resource for other students looking to enter into an internship or the Portland business scene. The Colab interns are encouraged to blog, video-blog and Twitter about their experiences all throughout. That being said, I thought it would be fitting to make my first act as a Colab intern of the class of '09 to be a blog post about the details of my application (particularly seeing as it was the source of my blog-distraction for a few months).

My Colab Application ::

We were asked to provide three samples (shown below). I included 1) A group project Internet Marketing Plan for the Broadway Farmers Market in Seattle. Acted as group coordinator, designer and programmer for updated website, 2) DRY Soda Press Cards. With Turnstyle, acted as Project Manager and 3) Current marketing topic report on QR Code applications in package design.

One of the largest and most complex portions of the application was an open-ended response question where we were told we could use any form of media. The question asked us how we would explain to an automaker the value of marketing, PR and advertising when they are only concerned with price-reduction strategy. For my submission (shown below), I created a small book that reiterated my response using first a full page with charts, then just one paragraph, then one sentence and finally no words--the idea being, as an account manager you must be able to convey your team's idea in any way, whether that be a big long pitch or quick and short email. The book's cover was made with kraft paper and hand-sewn binding. Note the extra rad drawings of my "bull" and "bear" for the final page.

I grouped together all the main pieces into two bundles (shown below): the first included my résumé, business card, letters of recommendation, the application with my essay question responses and my little open-response book. The second bundle was my samples.

The whole thing was shipped out in this custom made envelope (shown below). Machine stitching on large sheets of kraft paper. Thanks to Maddy Eiche for letting me borrow her sewing machine!

And... then it was mailed and my Colab fate was resting in the hands of all the cool Portland professionals working with PAF.

The program is young (only in its second year), so I am sure it will be a growing process for all parties involved--but, I think that is what attracted me to the program. It is an adaptive concept that recognizes that there is no feasible way to learn everything about the creative business industry in the course of just one internship. Think bigger! Do more! Dive in the deep end and trust your skills! And most importantly, surround yourself with creative, excited, helpful individuals and figure it out. I am really excited to devote so much of my time this summer to this program. I am eager to find out who my fellow interns are and who our client will be. This summer has officially been dedicated to creativity and collaboration. Go go go.

I begin my stint with Colab on July 11th at which time all of you, my dear blog readers, will be subjected to a steady dosage of internship stories right here on Breakfast for Dinner. Prepare yourself, it is going to be an intense six weeks. You will soon read, see, hear and watch everything I encounter while venturing into the wild mix of the Portland Creative Class.