New York, Take Four

I recently returned from a short trip to New York City. This trip had a much different motive than any of my other visits to the Big Apple. Sure, I had some fun on the side, but the main point of this trip was to meet with advertising professionals to learn as much insight on the industry in NYC and gain any advice I could for my final year of college going into my first real year of my “career.”

But of course being in New York on the weekend when the offices aren’t open, I had to have some fun first. Arriving on a game day for the Washington Huskies meant we had to find a good place to watch the football game. We found ourselves at the Rattle ‘N Hum on 33rd street. This bar happens to be designated by the University of Washington’s New York Alumni Association as their official bar to meet up for sports games and functions. I anticipated a good turn out, but I had no idea that the entire bar would be packed full of Huskies. Unfortunately, we lost to BYU, but most of the fans couldn’t be too upset due to the temporary open bar granted to all UW fans.

On Sunday, it just so happened to be the Brazilian festival on 6th Avenue. The entire street was closed for multiple blocks featuring stages with live music, dancing, street vendors and food. It was pretty incredible, but way too crowded for my liking.



We later took the Staten Island Ferry to see one of my good friends from West Seattle, Zach Varce, pitch for the Staten Island Yankees, the New York Yankees’ minor league team. They have a beautiful stadium right on the water with the Manhattan skyline right in the background of the outfield.


After the game we went to Lombardi’s Pizzeria, which is supposed to be the oldest pizzeria in the United States. I don’t know how factual that title is, but the taste sure measured up to it. Either that, or it was the fact that we had to wait over an hour to get a table at the Soho restaurant.


After the fun weekend, came time for the business part to my visit. Over the next three days, I would meet with marketers from JWT, Google, BBDO, OMD, Grey, Razorfish, Wunderman and Taylor. I got a wide array of advice, all of which was extremely helpful. I was learned more info on the agencies themselves, what the industry is like in New York versus Seattle, and the process of moving to a place like New York

What I learned there, combined with the advice I had gained from some of my supervisors at Wunderman made one thing clear: New York is where I need to go. Though intimidating, the rate of professional growth, the competitiveness, and the new-city-experience could prove to be one of the biggest challenges of my life, and hopefully the most rewarding.

A Wunderful Summer

My last entry was titled “My apologies…” jokingly in regards to how I anticipated the World Cup taking over the topics of the following blog entries. What I did not anticipate, however, was how busy I would be this summer. If you look at the date of the last update, it’s from three months ago, so for this, I really do apologize.

I just got through spending the summer interning at Wunderman Seattle for the commercial Microsoft account team. There, I supported the account teams aligned to the Windows 7 and the U.S. government’s public sector businesses.

This experience over the summer was quite an eye-opener since my previous internship seemed to be the polar opposite. I don’t mean this in a negative way in the slightest. GoMobile is a small, privately owned, alternative advertising agency, while at Wunderman, I was in a 300 person office, working on primarily digital campaigns with multiple network partners, while being owned by Y&R and WPP, one of the “big four” holding companies. Both types of agencies certainly had their different positives and negatives, but I am certainly glad I have been fortunate enough to experience both.

Though it’s near impossible to try and summarize three months at an agency into a single blog post, I am about to attempt to do so, so please bear with me.

For Windows 7 I got some exposure to campaigns aligned to the consumer and small to midsize business segments. These display banner campaigns ran on-network (MSCOM). Because I started there at the very end of Microsoft’s fiscal year, a lot of work included analysis and reporting on the past years’ campaigns’ performance to optimize for FY11. Additionally, regular upkeep of the campaigns was performed- making sure the redirects and tags were firing appropriately.



For Public Sector, I was fortunate enough to see the complete creation and execution of two campaigns, though I was involved in three others. One of which was Microsoft’s Q5 Federal campaign, which targeted the government’s Department of Defense and Civilian divisions. Because the government’s IT infrastructure has always been subpar to the rest of the business world, this campaign positions itself to show how Microsoft’s solutions can really enhance their productivity. This campaign included web design for the on-network landing pages and also creating on-network and external display banners. I was also heavily involved in the tracking throughout the campaign, working closely with our media partner, MEC, to make sure all redirects, Atlas, and RIO tags are implemented correctly.

I also took the lead on “Education Desktop” for Public Sector during the summer. This campaign targeted the government’s education division by making them aware of how Microsoft’s products can help in the classroom. Free trials and webinars were available on the landing page to show exactly how this can be done. I helped implement the email deployment by working with VML, one of our network creative partners to make necessary changes, and with Exact Target, to deploy emails to our internal lists, and with Merit Direct to deploy to our external contact list.

Besides the day-to-day support I provided for the previously mentioned and other campaigns, the intern team was also in charge of completing a cumulative project. With so many interns, sixteen total, we were divided up into two teams. Each team was to have an account lead, two strategists, two media planners (MEC interns), two data analysts and a creative. I took on the role of the account lead.

Each team was given the same client input brief for a campaign supporting the launch of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 5.0. It included the same information, parameters, budget, and objectives that the actual FTE Wunderman account team had been given by the client. From this, using the Wunderman Network and Microsoft corpnet resources, including prior campaigns, we were to develop a client-ready strategic agency plan. It was quite challenging, seeing as this was most of the interns’ first time having an internship so digitally focused, but we used the resources available and what we learned in our day-today work with our client-facing teams to execute.

It was a great experience because we were set up and interacted exactly how teams within the agency work. To make it as real as possible, objectives even changed midway through the SAP development, to which we had to adapt. After the strategic agency plan was finished, we turned it into a visual deck to be presented to the Wunderman network’s senior leadership board, including the global client lead, the actual Dynamics CRM team, and the actual Microsoft Dynamics client. This was a challenging but rewarding experience, as we were posed with difficult yet thought-provoking questions in our question and answer sessions.



Besides enjoying the work I was doing and who I was working with, I had a great time overall. I made some great friends within the agency and the other interns. I learned an immense amount that I am sure to bring with me wherever the next step in my career may be.