Today was early. We had to meet up by 8:45 this morning. It wasn’t only an early day, but also a long day because we had two media visits in one day. It was all fine and dandy though, but it poured all day long (and would pour harder when it was time to walk somewhere). We were a cute flock of umbrellas trenching through the London streets.
We made it to our first media visit to a small advertising agency called, Battenhall, where we got to meet with the founder of the company, Drew Benvie. He told us how he grown skills in media early on in his career because he knew technology would change the way we communicate majorly, and obviously his assumptions were correct because now his clients are some of the most well-known brands around, like Google, Microsoft, Nandos, Waze, Hertz, and many more.
A cool thing he told us about his business was he gives his employees work hours for free time to sharpen their personal skills that could help the company, like learning a language or playing with a new program, etc. The other cool employee perks were such a relaxed work space, they had a technology allowance when hired and then annually, unlimited holiday, and a well-being allowance. It sounded like working in heaven.
We then got a presentation from every working part of the whole advertising and P.R. process, once they get a client. We talked to Stephanie Bennett, who worked a lot with the campaign work. She brought up a few key points I liked like, “You’re not leading if you feed right into the target market,” which is a strategy often used, so I really liked her outlook on that. Then just showed us how to properly prepare content, and planning out postings efficiently.
We talked to an Alice and Shannon who worked with the P.R. side of things. They focus on responding to topics instead of producing content. Which is also called, news jacking, but they do a lot of other things as well like media monitoring, creating media lists, creating press releases, and throwing pitches out to journalists. The last one is crucial for this type of business because that’s who you connect with to give your client’s a chance to be published or broadcasted. They said the key thing to getting journalists to write, is to give them good data that will really back their story up and make it worth writing, and to look up journalists before reaching out, so you know who you are dealing with.
Data and Insights was the next area we covered with Jonny Atter, and we just went over a lot of reputation management, and how to find the performance trends in a company’s advertisements, and published content. He said a few of the things they look at in a post is location, comments, sentiment, time slots, views, followers, and Wikipedia alerts.
We also talked to Meg Edwards and Leah Domenet about influencers. They explained how influencers build awareness, create beneficial partnerships between the company and influencer, but influencers have to be very social savvy and have social media across all main channels. Many influencers are paid through free products or services through their brand partnership, but some are also paid if they reach a macro audience. The process starts with talking about budget and content, then find an influencer, agree to the fees and secure the brief, then create and approve content, and finally, see the results.
We ended this trip talking to Charlie Gregger who works in the design department, but we had to rush this one, so he went over a lot of the basics about producing visuals like animations, films, graphics, snapchat filters, and photos. He said you take a bunch of research and strategy to create efficient influential visuals. Overall, I really loved Battenhall, it was one of the cutest little agencies. I would leave the United States to work there to be real. We took a group photo, and then one of the P.R. girls came up to me to ask how I did my makeup because she loved it and wanted to know what I used, so I wrote down a few things for her, but I thought that was so sweet!
We then had a whole other media visit. I was exhausted, but trucked through it. I’ll be honest I probably had an attitude with my classmates, but it’s fine. We walked over to Burson Cohn & Wolfe. They were a much bigger corporation, but they explained why they were moving away from PR, and focusing more on media marketing. We did a cool activity while we were there, where we had to create an ad campaign plan to sell butter to a new market.
After our visit, I went to a little coffee shop below our hotel to work on the class blogs with Naomi. I had an amazing crepe to hold me over until dinner there (it was Nutella and strawberry). Then, dinner came and we went to Nando’s, but they were out of wraps, so I had a moment and just got a kid’s meal. We went to a little bar to end the night, but I snuck off a few doors down to check out the drag scene because that’s where I would be if I was back in the U.S. There was a drag idol going on and I just got to see the end at Admiral Duncan. I met a few queens that knew the queens from back home, so that was really cool. Then, I met with everyone, and we walked back to the hotel together and ended the night.