Brainstorming & Stormy Nights

Week three was full of daily thunder storms that I luckily avoided each and every time. During this week I was able to sit in on a brainstorming session for the naming of a cause marketing idea. Here are a few tips I learned from the account supervisor who organized and moderated the meeting:

1. Send homework questions for everyone to answer a day or two before. It helps get the session started with ideas instead of a lot of silent thinking.

2. Try to think up idea buckets that are relevant to what you believe you will end up with. This will organize your thoughts and help those involved generate ideas as well.

3. After all ideas are up on the boards, give participants dots or markers so they can note which are the top 3 ideas.

4. Finally, and I guess it should be first, make certain all the right people are invited. For this session there was creative, strategic, account, client and public relations present and fully participating.

Week 3 also involved a lot of work on the new business pitch I mentioned before. The dynamics were great with my team members even though I ended up I putting in more hours and had to become more of a manager rather than remain a fellow intern. Once I was able to gather information and advise the team players who needed it on what they needed to do, I was then left with putting the presentation together. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining as everyone has to learn at some point. However, it is just frustrating that I get called out for working overtime because of others not delivering their portions of the project. In the real world, this happens and I am okay with it. But in the intern world, this is a no-no since OT may cause the company to go over-budget. So now I have been told not to work over 35 hrs a wk (what agency employee REALLY works as little as that EVERY week???) and that I must take a day off in order to offset the extra time earned.

So what have I learned from this project??
First, don't be afraid to step on toes especially when it's obviously team members don't know what they are doing. I tried so hard not appear as if I was trying to take over (believe I didn't want to do all the work myself), that I was a know it all (this was harder only because I had a better understanding of what was expected of us thanks to Brandcenter training) or that I wasn't willing to let my team members to learn that would be beneficial to them such as using an IMS database. With all my trying, I realized a little too late that because all were more than willing to do stuff, I should have taken the initiative and showed them what needed to be done how to do it as well.

Most importantly I realized that even though the agency wanted to provide "a real agency experience" by shortening our time to work on the project (the client had also given the agency less time), that did not mean to work like one would in an agency. We were expected to work on our primary accounts and the new biz pitch and get it all done within a total 70 hours or 35 hrs each week. So from this I learned, it is better to eat hours and not get paid, than to document the truth and be "talked to".

For those of you who are in the ad business and even those of you who are not, is it realistic to put different requirements on an intern than on an employee, but still expect a similar quality of work? Then again, maybe that's it. Maybe the agency wasn't expecting a high quality of work from the interns and this was just a way to take us through the motions of a pitch.