Everyone always says the second night of sleep is the worst. I was naive and didn’t believe what was being told of me. I thought that if we did so much during the day that I would be able to sleep not only peacefully at night, but throughout the entire night.
This just wasn’t the case.
Unfortunately for me, my peaceful slumber came to an immediate halt at around 3:30 London time. With a wake-up call of around 7:30, this was the least ideal situation I could possibly think of. I tossed and turned for the remaining hours without successfully falling asleep.
After a long (and rainy walk) throughout different neighborhoods in London, we arrived at the first media stop of the day: Battenhall. Battenhall is one of the first integrated marketing communications firms to specialize in social media. We heard from various parts of their team, each giving insight into how the firm worked as a whole.
I found this media visit to be not only extremely intriguing as someone who is so passionate about PR, but also super informative as they gave us information on some of their best practices in-house. Some of the departments we heard from included: influencer communication, data and insight analytics, creative and PR specialists.
The second stop of the day was at Burson Cohn and Wolfe, a worldwide integrated marketing communication firm. BCW has over 138 offices spanning 48 different countries worldwide. They even have an office in Pittsburgh wherein a familiar name to us works — Steve Radick.
BCW’s creative team walked us through they sparked their own creativity to produce visuals that are out of the box and unique to drive attention for brand awareness.
Outside of just being creators, the creative team has also provided creative support and training to brands. They summed the entire process up in four words: define, discover, design and deliver. Towards the end, they put our PR skills to the test in an interactive task to create a brief. The purpose of the activity was to showcase the importance of the relationship between strategy and creative.
Our long day (and my minimal sleeping from the night prior) left us in need of one thing… a nap and genuine rest time. Once we were awake and refreshed, it was time for dinner. We chose a little Italian restaurant just around the corner from our hotel, thanks to Yelp. To wash it all down we took a journey towards Leicester Square for gelato. At the gelato place, we found out that fairytales do truly exist in London.
The local (who worked at the small shop) told us he was visiting the States soon to surprise his friend for her birthday. He hasn’t seen her in 11 years, since the first time they met. It sounds cliche, and it honestly is, but the story is as follows.
They met at the airport. He accidentally spilled coffee on her white shirt. In an effort to fix the situation at hand, he bought her another shirt. They exchanged emails that day 11 years ago, and they’ve been emailing back and forth ever since.
You would think that this is a romantic story… and this guy definitely was in love with this girl, but the story unraveled whenever he said ‘I’m planning this surprise with her boyfriend.’
Needless to say, whether romantic or strictly platonic, fairytales do exist in London.