Background
On September 5th, 2018, I began my first day at an internship with the globally-known publication that has captivated Texans (born-and-raised as well as Texans-at-heart). The collaboration was through the advertising department with UT’s Moody College, and included regular check-ins, assignments, and evaluations; as well as a speaker series. However, the internship came about as a result of an interaction years before at a Communications Career Fair. The internship lasted until December 7th, for over 180 hours at and about the office.
The “National Magazine of Texas” has a global readership of about 2.5 million, has won dozens of awards since its establishment in 1973, and has expanded to include recurring special issue publications, newsletters, merchandise, publications like The Texanist, and highly-anticipated annual events like the BBQ Fest in Austin. Many of the 100 or so employees are also award-winning, such as Nobel Prize author Mimi Swartz, famed food critic Patricia Sharpe, and renowned crime long-form authors Skip Hollandsworth and Michael Hall.
Position
I was hired into the Audience Development intern position, as their second ever. In this capacity, I worked within the audience development department and the more-encompassing circulation department, under the guidance of some incredible professionals. While my work involved research and analytics primarily, the company allows cross-collaboration among its interns and as such, I have had the privilege of exploring many other departments overseeing production, podcasts, the general store, events, edit, photography, and more.
Summary
A core part of my work was to develop weekly and monthly reports based on analytics obtained from Google Analytics, Sprout Social, Parse.ly, Twitter Analytics, Instagram Insights, and CrowdTangle. I would gather data for the period, fill out an Excel template and a highlights document detailing trends I noticed, and then share these with the circulation department. Other regular duties included updating an office whiteboard daily with our percent to monthly user goal, attending audience development meetings where I saw the application of my work driving conversations and company redirection (such as data on the attitudes on social towards our midterm coverage), and updating frequently-used reports.
Conversely, event planning was more occasional. On a smaller scale, I was welcome at all meetings (like editorial discussions of upcoming issue story ideas, national conferences online like ONA, and pitches from advertising agencies like Tilted Chair and Heart of the Sun).
The highlight of my time at Texas Monthly was releasing an ad that I created for the General Store to Facebook and Instagram. Based on previous analytics, it targeted two different lookalike audiences differentiated by age, gender, location, and online interests. I created these ad sets in Facebook Ad Manager, input creative, and then published. I also wrote copy for a social media campaign that was automatically scheduled for release on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook via Airtable and CoSchedule, and contributed documents full of ideas for creative branding such as a gift-shaped sticky for the website over the holidays. Another enjoyable moment was helping standardize the company’s SEO (often cited as our “lowest hanging fruit”) by creating UTMs from article slugs in Campaign URL Builder.
Much of my time with my supervisor was spent updating the many live analytics documents Texas Monthly keeps. For example, the All Campaigns Analysis document is a record of every media campaign from video content to newsletters that includes all audience targeting specifics as well as results, to drive future campaign decisions. I also frequently updated a 6 month averages document to check weekly report analytics against past averages (this included an Instagram scratch sheet with analytics from all stories and usage). The EMT document was another, with detailed analytics data made available to the entire company daily.
The rest of my time was spent completing projects for other members of the audience development department and related. For example, one day was spent creating and organizing the web pages for new products offered in the General Store, using Shopify. Another lengthy project was to gather information on all Texas Monthly copyrights since establishment (ie, all issues dating back to 1973) from a variety of sites and coalescing it into one searchable excel file. I got to learn a lot about the daily runnings of large companies in this way, such as by completing reports on renewal scheduling and working with their partner Palm Coast Data, and even through fulfilling customer service problems and back issue orders.
Other relevant projects included a cross-tabulation of survey responses collected during BBQ Fest, helping to balance subscription and non-subscription mailings each month to ensure accurate advertiser licensing, and analyzing demographic trends on the Texas Monthly website. I have also organized ad categories for content tags, found trends in Twitter and Facebook monthly data exports, and kept a log from Instagram Insights. Even my secretarial duties were relevant; for example, inputting the yearly schedule into Basecamp gave me insights into division of duty.
Journal
09/05
Finally, these names will appear later in my journaling as part of my wd: Robert Davila, Natalie Moore, Lorelei, Stacey, Johana, Kristen, Regina
09/07
09/10
09/12
09/14
09/17
09/19
09/21
09/24
09/26
09/28
This day was Intern Orientation, although it felt a little late for someone who began a month earlier. Regardless, it was a good learning experience. Although not all of the interns showed and we had a small group this year anyway, we bonded over the Jimmy John’s brought up for lunch (their veggie sandwich was surprisingly good, as were their pickles and kettle chips). Julia and Jack were the editorial interns I had seen at the Edit meeting; I very rarely saw the others, but Julia and I would walk to the bus stop together for many of our remaining days afterward. We formed a good friendship culminating on my penultimate day, where she showed me how Pat Sharpe uses a specialized food critic worksheet to gauge the quality of hamburgers; Julia thought the pickles were fine, when according to the pro they most certainly were not. Who knew that was possible?
Our schedule ran through each department, giving me my first look at Production which I would later explore with Stacey, the department head and Intern Coordinator. Here is where I learned about the dummy book, a paper trail of every article and ad that could be swapped out easily for last-minute changes. The Photo Edit team showed us examples of their work on issue covers, discussing at length a BBQ cover hearkening back to Dutch renaissance painting or some such style I later saw an example of in my oil painting class. Brian headed the TM Studio, a blossoming podcast development team that produces Sound Check among other staples. There are also often internal client projects in the works, such as visitor guides and other custom books.
I also got a look at Audience Development from an angle I was not really privy to during my internship. For example, we discussed expire files and how belly-bound ads around issues are broken up by DMA in the issue plan. We also learned about how Texas Monthly uses MRI Mediamark research, which creates a 116 page codebook from 25,000 face-to-face interviews. Next, Robert covered cross-tabulation among indexes (like my Media Planning class!) and how to use it to determine reach and frequency in their reports, as well as cost-ranking against all magazines. This is something I would actually cover among my last days of my internship; similar to Media Radar, which he introduced and explained as being able to see ads from other companies and print schedules. Finally, we went over the under/over analysis, which shows which publications are over 100. Most in the state of Texas under deliver, until you add Texas Monthly. That’s a great pitch to advertisers! A final tidbit gleaned was that unfortunately, newsstand relies too much on the wholesalers.
09/29
Trib Fest (Texas Tribune) was a simple brand recognition activation where we set up a booth full of branded merchandise and provided a “Texas-sized” Plinko board. To play the game and win a prize from the booth, passersby would provide their emails to sign up for our newsletter, which led them to an email nurture campaign designed for subscription conversions. I passed around iPads to facilitate newsletter signups, as well as answered questions, encouraged people to wait in line, and provided and restocked inventory. Potentially the best part of this overcast and very humid day was Johnny letting me leave for lunch at a food truck serving chilaquiles, and then letting me take a piece of nearly every available category of swag from water bottles and mini coolers to pint glasses and Texas candles. Even the day before, when I stayed late, he let me take everything from bandannas to mugs from his corner of the office.
10/01
This was the first day where we added lines for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram sessions in the weekly Highlights documents. This includes notation of when sites like Pocket and Hacker News beat Twitter or Instagram. This was also my first time doing the monthly as well as the weekly report, which while similar took most of the day to get used to and find EMT data for (mostly post engagement stats) from Facebook Insights.
10/03
The day started out with the weekly Audience Development meeting, as we made comments for edits on four subscription video ads set to release soon. It was an interesting experience to watch the process and hear advice from pros on all aspects from the exact amount of seconds title cards stayed up to the precise moment audio should be clipped to pay proper respect to the visual tagline. We also spent some time watching the radio wave animation process, and discussing how transcriptions for muted videos are made manually. The overall tactic was to create new audiences for targeting from those who viewed the ad for 3+ seconds, and to create a PCD order landing page especially for those who click on the ad with a custom tagline. This brought about an interesting discussion regarding native advertising, as it comes across painfully to viewers if not square for Instagram but would cost extra to have it reformatted due to using an agency that isn’t in-house. A common budget for boosted video campaigns on social is $100, but it can be as little as $25-30 a day.
Here, we also heard the results of Trib Fest: thanks in part to my work, Texas Monthly got 237 new newsletter email sign-ups during bad weather in a short activation! There were also a lot of program names that got tossed around, such as Trend Kite and Meltwater (which show sentiment in comments from keywords and pieces respectively), Campaign Monitor, Piano, Hubspot, and Drip.
10/05
10/08
On this day, I started examining comment sentiment manually and in earnest. Taking a list of political articles from Texas Monthly, I used CrowdTangle to find the associated Facebook post and then went through each comment, determining whether they were positive (towards Texas Monthly–this was unsurprisingly rare), neutral, or negative (towards Texas Monthly). There was a high propensity of negativity due to perceived political biases and claims of “fake news.” These findings were later discussed in meetings with credit given to me and alternatives proposed for later processes of article and title copy, as well as how to respond to comments. Much later, some of these latter alternatives included canned responses to common complaints as well as responses from a personal account to add a human explanation and remind readers that it is impossible to cover politics without someone thinking they’re biased.
10/10
Not yet.
10/12
Part of this day was spent taking inventory in one of the back closets for Kristen; of all shirts from sizes S to 3XL and of aprons for BBQ Club members. This was a satisfying task as I got to roll up each shirt to my personal standards and neatly arrange them according to size until the entire closet was organized. I would later return to this closet multiple times, eventually reducing the number of aprons from 40 to nearly none.
Next, Natalie and I met with Matt to discuss UTM tracking links and image sizes (1080×1080). Midterm coverage came up here again as the sentiment was a little amusing given that the magazine has always leaned liberal and the audience is simply getting older and less so. This led to a conversation on podcasts, especially the “Underdog” one receiving huge coverage even nationally due to its examination of Beto’s chances at election.
In addition to returning to this report to include gender and location, I learned how to use the Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder with links shortened with bit.ly for use on Facebook.
Once ads have the proper URLs, they can be scheduled on Airtable and CoSchedule (Buffer would be better but Texas Monthly recently reached a size where this would make sense and has not yet looked at it) for the “best time,” which is not on the hour because then it would face too much competition from other ads from other companies. Other fun pieces of strategy are included in this such as considering when users are likely to read a long-form article posted (possibly around 7pm during dinner after work) as opposed to a newsletter (in the morning with breakfast).
10/15
10/17
Not yet.
10/19
This was an exhausting but fulfilling day, as much was struggled through before checking out for the day with Johana, yet much was accomplished. The first steps were to update the kitchen board and to check on the Fall Collection ads; sadly, they were already disabled due to the sticker shock they caused.
The first big task was for Robert, and involved filling out the Renewal Fusion spreadsheet. This document laid out all renewal scheduling, with 6 efforts (5 being the highest priority focused toward subscribers who just received their “last issue,” and A the lowest priority) and all their data compiled by Palm Coast Data/PCD on their Renewal Standard Reports. This required a lot of searching, double-checking, and revising of the Bible document that originally had some things labeled incorrectly causing this work to spill over into the next work day as I put data back in its rightful place. I marked all updated line items red and ensured that the formulas calculated costs properly.
The second big task was to continue updating 2 tabs on the EMT document with data from Facebook Insights on video posts. This was frustrating and required very careful date selection for the video to appear so that responses to it could be properly measured.
10/22
After completing the weekly report and updating the kitchen board, I completed Robert’s project from the previous week. Then I moved through most of the remaining members of the department. First I checked in with Kristen for some BBQ Club packet fulfillment, then Johana to help document customer mail. Finally I returned to Natalie to discuss my work on the Midterm Coverage and Headlines documents I had been filling out.
The next task was to update our documentation of Instagram Stories. This entailed logging into the Texas Monthly account on my personal phone and scrolling back through the archive to August. From there I would click through each slide of each story, noting the count of “seen by” as it flashed rapidly past.
The next step was to fill out Web Traffic in the same spreadsheet, by scrolling to the dates that these stories were released in Google Analytics and pulling the number of “sessions by social” for those days. Since the previous intern Hannah was using a different method to find these numbers, I also went back and fact-checked the entire document through 2017.
10/24
Not yet.
10/29
Not yet.
10/31
Halloween was an auspicious day. Wendy came dressed as the Greatest Showman, one department coordinated a “fake news” costume, and Natalie announced her 3 week notice to me outside of our building. Our weekly meeting focused on the subscription video ads being released soon, and the possibility of a 3-way split on December issue covers dependent on the results of the midterm elections. Stephanie (who would announce her departure soon as well) also made a poignantly humorous connection between the November issue cover (an extremely dark feast with purple tones and floating candles such that you could nearly see a knife being stabbed into the turkey). The rest of my time was dedicated to completing work from Monday, and then filling out the General Store tab on the All Campaigns Analysis document. That one was a doozy, requiring lots of research into audience targeting in Ads Manager, as well as meticulous note-taking on data from customized columns pulled from the same location.
11/02
The majority of this day was spent spamming my coworkers’ emails with notifications from the Audience Development Basecamp calendar. Beginning on November 9 and using a spreadsheet with all known upcoming deadlines, I filled out the rest of the year and all of 2019 while attaching Robert, Lorelei, Kristen, and Johana to their scheduling.
11/03
This was the day of the inaugural Texas v. West Virginia activation. My mom arrived halfway through so that we could see the game after, and stood with me as I held the pole keeping our banner (a photo-booth-style cover with with passersby could put themselves “on the cover of Texas Monthly“) from flying away with the wind. I took some of those pictures of visitors to our booth on Bevo Boulevard, restocked our merchandise, answered questions and directed them to Johana and Robert, brought in people to play Plinko, and thus captured newsletter sign-ups. An exciting bonus was being announced by the MC as he stood with us and encouraged people to visit our booth in between announcements about gates opening, Bevo parading by, and the like.
11/04
The very next day, I attended the BBQ Fest activation, which was a delight. The first 40 minutes or so after checking in and receiving my volunteer t-shirt, Matt set me free to sample Tejas Chocolate (with delicious barbecue), Snow’s BBQ (with a very long line), the Texas Pie Factory (with a half-dozen full slices of pie!), and more. I also took in the music, functional smokers, delicious scents, and general happy atmosphere on the pleasantly sunny day. Then, I provided inventory (keeping track of it) to cashiers at the General Store. When other volunteers left, I stepped up to encourage sales, answer questions, man the cash register, check out customers using the Square app and a card reader attached to my phone, provide discounts and coupons, and more. It was a fulfilling experience to be given such a level of trust by my employers, and respect from my customers. I also got a “Calling Bull Since 1973” hat for my effort.
11/05
And with that, I was back at work for the fourth day in a row despite my usual MWF 10-3pm schedule. Thankfully, they went easy on me considering my previous effort. I completed all aspects of the weekly report, then moved to Instagram reports. There, I just updated the Story Slides and Web Traffic document by adding a new “call to action” column and adding counts of Instagram stories from March onward.
11/07
At the meeting this day, there were some interesting reports about BBQ Fest. Namely, 43 out of the 100 people who won tickets on the 3rd came (a better percentage than the client list), and 70 media outlets were present, including international ones! Discussion based on my experience also led to the decision that in the future, BBQ Fest will provide volunteers with cheat-sheets/FAQs and have a higher proportion of cashiers to inventory managers. Another addition may be providing BBQ Club members with ambassador shirts saying “ask me about BBQ Club.” After the meeting, I took all of the ballots held in a metal bucket from the “guess the number of balloons in the TM sign at BBQ Fest” and put them in an Excel spreadsheet with name, zip code, email, and their guess. I disqualified some repeats, and organized the list according to guessed number to find the winner and two runner-ups.
Luckily I got a break after this, getting two cupcakes and sparkling cider at a baby shower in the conference room. The cupcakes were honestly divine, and the gifted baby cowboy boots were adorable. Finally, I ended the day by adding top stories to each week in the 6-month Averages document, as well as highlighting the weeks in which print and digital issues went live.
11/09
Upon arriving at work this day, I updated the kitchen board.
11/12
Some stuff happened.
11/14
Now this was a busy day.
11/16
On this fated day, my supervisor Natalie said her goodbyes during a rush of completing final tasks. Accordingly, a portion of this burden fell to me with me doing a number of small tasks in rapid succession (mostly for Arielle). After updating the kitchen board with the number of users we had reached by this point in the month against our goal, I began work on assembling four binders for her to hand out full of best practices, suggested duty segmentation, passwords, and more. This involved copying, hole-punching, and organizing the five flush sections per binder with dividers and fabricating tab titles from carefully-cut blank label stickers using a white-out pen and a Sharpie. They were works of art if I do say so myself. However they took far longer than expected, as I copied each sheet individually at first, having never been shown that the copier was able to take an entire ream of paper and copy and collate it all neatly and within a minute. Thankfully I got a break in the middle of all the hard work, as Johnny invited me to Taco Deli (bean and cheese) breakfast tacos and orange juice in the main conference room.
Afterwards, Robert snagged me to format responses from surveys administered at the BBQ Fest (that I later saw sent out to many others on Slack). This was a simple matter of centering and merging the leftmost column, separating individual responses with a thin border, outlining sections with a thick border, and annotating comments on the side for notable statistics. An amusing distraction came when Robert was showing me how to do this in his office for an exaggerated amount of time while the rest of the gang hid behind the door, waiting to surprise Natalie when she walked in. She received a framed and signed Photoshop of her on the Chip and Joanna Gaines cover, which is apparently a revived tradition, and later a photo-shoot around the office as I left for the day. I gave her a “thank you” card detailing the effect she had on me, as well as my business card to keep in touch. It was evident how missed she would be, and how lucky I was to have interned for her.
11/19
This first day without Natalie went surprisingly smoothly, if without much bustle. My notes do not indicate much happening beyond working on Arielle’s copyright spreadsheet and answering emails about interdepartmental shadowing.
11/26
Having missed breakfast this day, I was delighted to arrive and find communal pumpkin bread in the kitchen. It paired oh-so-well with a much-needed cup of coffee as I finally got to update the neglected Instagram Scratch Sheet with Natalie’s screenshots of Instagram Insights for Regina. This involved a bit of fun detective work/math, as she had forgotten to upload some weeks but the data could be derived from statements such as “up 582 users from the previous week.” I then got to complete the weekly report for the final time, and flew through it as a master with pride for work I knew was done well. A delicious cherry on top was being able to update the usually-missing Instagram columns on the 6-month Averages document and the section on the Highlights document, thanks to the aforementioned Instagram Scratch Sheet. It was also satisfying to trawl back through the “social” tab on the 6-month Averages document and fill in all the missing Instagram pieces (this included more fun detective work).
That day, Robert also introduced a prospecting report (with data gathered on Media Radar and Power BI). Simply put, he needed thousands of specific items on these sites coalesced into 6 groups: apparel & accessories, beer, wine & spirits, retail, medical/pharmaceutical, travel, and home. This required common sense as there were many items that did not fit these categories, or could fit several. It took the rest of my day.
11/28
The building Christmas lights were up and on in full force this day, and a pleasure to see when I left directly after our weekly meeting that had been pushed to 2pm (at which I learned that Brett had killed many of Natalie’s accounts that I used, and that the January Bum Steer cover will likely center around Alex Jones’ mind exploding and fragmenting into the other characters featured). The first half of the day was instead spent working on copyrights for Arielle, until in the late 2000s both copyright documentation websites stopped pulling results for Texas Monthly issues. A brief period of time was also spent mailing three copies of The Texanist for Kristen.
The rest of my time was spent with Johana. We went over Texas Monthly’s Statement of Ownership, and I was fascinated to learn that its basic circulation stats appear in every issue like a nutrition label. This breaks down how many magazines go out each month as “comp” (complementary) to non-subscribers, because if that percentage is 50% or more the company could face losing its license. Luckily it tends to average around 76% subscriber issues. Using this information and a series of forms detailing it, I filled out December’s balancing sheets and then marked the forms for accounting, highlighting important numbers such as paid circulation, total issues mailed, etc.
11/30
The original goal for this day was to read best practices for website stickies/pop-ups and find good examples of those and paywall implementations on competitors such as The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Observer. Instead, I spent the last hour of the day working on Robert’s categorization task, until my eyes crossed and I had to stumble into his office and hand him his laptop back with the thousand or so items nearly fully categorized.
As for the other 4 hours, Edit co-opted use of all interns for research into the February issue, which will have a commemorative anniversary theme called “Love Letters to Texas,” focusing on land, characters, traditions, and booms/busts. I pulled a dozen issues from the back issue closet, thumped them onto my desk, flipped through for each article listed as desired, and took photos with my phone of every page. These were then uploaded to my computer (through a very dilapidated USB cord genuinely held together with tape) and sent to the same printer that everyone else was using that day. This caused excessive wait times for the poor souls with one or two pages to print, as my batch of articles alone amounted to 249 full-color pages.
Had this phase gone properly, I might have still left that day smiling. However my spirit was broken upon the realization that the printer not only output each back confusingly two-sided, but with just enough pages out of order to require me to go through the entire lot multiple times to reorganize them and painstakingly check that they were finally correct. Eventually handing the stack to Arielle at the front desk and being able to calmly sit for my lunch at 2pm was a huge relief.
12/03
This day saw the final iteration of Robert’s categorization task. Rather than going through each of the potentially thousands of highly-specific categories and organizing them into a few groups, I took a pivot table to find all previously-unspecified category names from a massive Excel spreadsheet and updated each one with a more general title that became part of a short list of groups. This made the work much faster, and it was satisfying to refresh the sheet and watch the completed items vanish.
The rest of the day was spent organizing my digital files to see what I should keep, and writing my Final Report for the associated internship course. The majority of that is reprinted here throughout the other sections of this post.
12/05
Little of this penultimate day was spent at my desk. The first hour went towards a final Audience Development meeting, where we learned that the Spaces SIP performed 1/6th as well as BBQ SIPs usually do, that Mimi Swartz’s book signing for Ticker was set to do well, and that a new partnership was recently struck with TripAdvisor. Shortly after, the gang walked (briskly, due to the chill) to Cooper’s BBQ downtown for my farewell lunch. The highlight of that was either the potato salad, or the discussion of legendary wipe-outs in Texas Monthly history (from over-competitiveness at the office Olympics, to a dance floor mishap at Edge in Dallas).
Upon our return, we collectively fought off sleep and got back to work. For me, this meant receiving an assignment from Robert (to be completed Friday) and spending the rest of my time organizing the back issue closet for Johana. This immensely satisfying task saw me stuffed into a tiny closet with the heady scent of magazines from 1973 filling the air; shifting boxes according to size and label (stacking recent issues in order beginning closer to the door), filling folders from said boxes, and placing loose issues in their correct upright open folder. The result was a much more accessible area with each year (and more recently, month) paid its proper due–as well as my receipt of a coveted “Top 50 BBQ List” issue with the famed passport still inside, as a reward.
12/07
As the semester ended and the rain poured down, my final day at Texas Monthly came and went. Few things were on the docket that day; mostly just to update the graphs on this PowerPoint for Robert and to see Stacey for a tour of the Production department. The first task was done in a few hours, using previously-established pivot tables to search for the current Texas circulation of various publications and inputting the new data into graphs comparing them to Texas Monthly in 9 different categories (business, epicurean, fashion, general editorial, home, men’s, sports, travel, outdoor-adventure).
The day slipped by after that between digitally packing up my desk, organizing my portfolio, and saying goodbyes (earning business cards and recommendation offers from most, as well as a subscription and tote bag from sweet Johana). I met with Stacey near the end of it and learned, among many other things, that the rolls of paper used in printing weigh about 1 ton each! The press is a story tall, and when binding (with signatures being pages in batches of four, and a form being a set of these) the forms are hung upside down for the cover to be draped over–and glued and clamped into place–and the inserts to be blown up between them, to stick through the power of static. Absolutely fascinating process; it’s incredible the speed with which all this can be done (380,000 issues per hour and with changes to color or placement enacted on the fly), even including delays from the heated dryer causing fires and sheets tearing while they are stretched over the printing plates.
Evaluation
I leave this internship feeling confident about my chosen field of advertising, as well as my starting knowledge of the industry and some best practices. I received crash courses in a dozen widely-used analytics and business programs, participated frequently in productive and professional meetings of all varieties, and was able to apply my knowledge in all reports compiled for my department. This was also a fantastic first experience in an office, because from the first day I felt supported and prepared: I had a welcoming department full of great people, a comfortingly large binder of best practices to refer to, a gloriously well-stocked kitchen, and a supervisor who gave me tasks that were far more than just busywork. With all this, I wasn’t afraid to come to work each day even knowing I would be learning new things that could be difficult or confusing.
Skills gained from this internship have already helped me be very successful in my ADV 373 capstone course’s agency. I entered this internship and the account planning department of that class simultaneously, and by the end of both I can definitely say that account planning is my new career goal. I have a newfound confidence through qualification, understanding of core values of analytics, and knowledge of programs such as Google Analytics that brought our coursework to the next level, formed the backbone of all our creative messaging, and impressed our client. See that page for more.
I would recommend this internship to anyone considering account planning, as it explores many of the skills and thought processes required but not directly taught in any class. It also gives a great example of what it is like to work client-side with a good client, as opposed to the usual agency path; as well as how to work effectively in an office environment. In that sense, the internship does not utilize account planning through researching for a client’s campaign, as publications do not do that; but it teaches analytics and communication of them all the same. I loved every second of this work.