My second week at Sunny Media included my first day at work, and my second day interning. Both days provided fantastic real word experiences, such as media scheduling, internal meetings and meetings with media representatives.
The work day (Monday) mostly involved working with Michelle to create media schedules. I was a little stressed to start the day, because timing and traffic were not on my side! I will be careful to give myself more time in future, because I was nearly five minutes late for work.
Afterwards, Michelle set me up on a spare computer and taught me how to create a television media schedule for Sunny Media’s client Australian Events. I had to read off the media’s proposed schedule and put relevant information – media channel, series name, show timing, spots, cost, etc. – into a spreadsheet for clients to approve. I was worried at first, because I really didn’t want to make mistakes. However, I just took it slow and looked over it thoroughly. I was happy to finally put university theory to practice. I asked a lot of questions, and still made mistakes, despite this, Michelle was very grateful and happy with my work. That was a great relief to me.
While I was media scheduling, Tanya Bourne – one of Channel 7’s media representatives – came to the office for a meeting with Michelle. Much like the meeting with Lincoln, last week, we looked over clients’ current and future media plans. I like meeting new people and I’m familiar with the meeting process, so I was excited to participate in this meeting.
Afterwards, I returned to media scheduling. My biggest struggle with the scheduling was finding the most efficient way to translate the media’s proposals into our in-house media schedule format. Since I was dealing with many different media outlets, the schedule formats kept changing. However, eventually you find a pattern that works best for each outlet. As I continued, I was able to recognise what I was looking at, and how to translate it.
During the afternoon, we also had a quick meeting with Trevor Larkins, one of QA’s directors. Michelle, Trevor and I looked over media plans for the opening of White’s IGAs in Baringa, Bli Bli and Coolum. It was determined that live reads would play during opening week, and ads would begin afterwards. Plans were also made to develop new radio ads that were easy to update, which gave me good insight into forward planning with ads. I hadn’t considered that ads could be created to be easily modified for future use. Overall, the workday was fantastic, because I was extremely satisfied to be putting theory into real practice.
At interning the next day, I continued media scheduling and had more meetings with media reps. I showed up to the office, on time this time, and immediately began work on a media schedule for Premier Transport Group. Unlike yesterday, this was a radio media schedule. I had been concerned that radio may be harder, because I thought Michelle said it was, but it was about the same difficulty. I was confident I could handle it and wrapped up faster than Michelle expected!
Next I met Sarah Davis, QA’s Account Manager, for the first time. She got me to sit in a meeting with two Grant Broadcasters representatives: Lincoln and Christie. I’m starting to think Lincoln is going to be a regular around the office. He’s a nice guy, and even offered to show me around the Hot 91.1 station sometime. I felt very fortunate to receive his offer, because I had originally planned to start a radio career through university. It would be amazing to see another aspect of my career interests in action.
As per most meetings, we ran through clients. I learnt the importance of assuring an event aligns well with a client’s image and the importance of a well written PCR – post campaign report. One event didn’t represent a client’s image well, and so discussions were made about the viability of undertaking the event again.
At the end of the day, I finalised my contract details with QA, and noticed that my contract included the job title of Account Coordinator. I’m pumped to have a job title in my industry!
All in all, another very fruitful week. Can’t wait for the next!