Advertising as an industry can often come off as a super glamorous job and at times it totally is. There are fancy events, award ceremonies and lots of free booze. You watch shows like Mad Men and can’t help to fall in love with all the scandal and creativity that advertising should be all about. We strive to be the Pete Cambells, Don Drappers and Peggy Olsons of the world, only the accept and internship or entry level position and quickly we are reminded that with the glamorous side of the industry come some not-so-glamorous tasks.
This is in NO WAY a blog post complaining about what I have to do but more of a chance to highlight what day-to-day tasks really do include for someone at the bottom of the food chain.
Waiting
Most of my days includes waiting for something to do. As an intern in account services the task I have the privilege to do are passed down from my supervisor. Unfortunately many of the tasks she does take way more time for her to explain than to just do herself. Also, one of the key tasks for an account executive includes just answering a ton of emails and keep in contact with the client and every department in the agency. This really isn’t something I can really do on behalf of my supervisor.
Attending Meetings and More Meetings
I actually really enjoy attending meetings because I usually get to interact with other people from other departments like media or creative. When you have numerous projects going on at the same time you may end up in many meetings and status calls and internal reviews and project kick-offs and… so it can feel a bit like it’s consuming most of your time. But this is your chance to figure out what is going on or to realize you didn’t know what was going on…
Excel is Your Best Friend
I often feel like I make Excel spreadsheets for everything. For the past 3 days I have worked hour after hour logging what will be almost 4,000 pictures owned by our client. This is supposed to help our creatives with their photo selection for campaigns, even though the client has a database already created…
Killing Trees
In addition to the many documents we have saved on a server I’m often given the task to print out some of these documents regularly to be organized in binders that live on my supervisor’s desk. These include invoices and billing documents dating back to when we got the account. The task is simple and requires only 10 minutes of my time, 20% of my brain and a bunch of poor trees.
So advertising isn’t always super cool and exciting, but I’ve learned that if I can leave the office with a smile everyday knowing that I like the people I work with and the outcome of these less glamorous tasks do help improve what we are doing as a whole, then I can survive this internship and even an entry-level position. I need to serve my time doing some less fantastic tasks. Unfortunately some of these less spectacular tasks never go away. That’s the reality of working in general. Not everything is going to gum drops and butterflies. But honestly because of that, you can appreciate the fun, glamorous things more.
Marissa Osowsky 