Hello There.
I’m Shakeel.
The fancy jargon for what I’ve been gaining experience in at LUMINUS is called Digital Marketing.
I must say that I learned quite a few things that I couldn’t otherwise at that 40-hour thing known as my current job.
I’ve learned that petting a dog serves as a very therapeutic break from typing feverishly.
I’ve learned that the client will try your patience, but you must instead imagine them as a ball you hit out of the Bison’s Stadium in the bottom of the ninth, bringing all your sanity home.
I’ve learned that the key to accomplishing any given task is to focus and then after that, focus some more.
For my final hurrah, I was tasked with creating some humorously informative copy for the summer 2016 internship campaign.
The theme of the campaign was baseball, which was inspired by the office being a literal stone’s throw away from the Bison’s stadium.
To be honest, after getting the brief about the campaign, I immediately thought to myself: I know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about baseball. (No pressure.)
I comforted my anxiety by finding baseball related movies on Netflix and pirate movie sites the weekend after receiving the brief.
By the beginning of the next week, I was ready to “play ball”.
(Yes, that was obnoxiously corny, but I was fully committed after watching “The Sandlot” 3 times.)
After careful deliberation, I decided that the name for the campaign should be “Rise of the Rookies,” which I felt symbolized eager college students and recent graduates with little-to-no experience honing their skills and preparing themselves for careers in advertising.
Thankfully, the other interns and employees dug the name also.
From there, I began creating baseball-related descriptions for the available openings, office culture, and other important details applicants would want to know.
As I wrote, things became a little easier, as I now had a better idea of what I was doing.
While the writing came at ease, collaboration with the other interns wasn’t. We all had schedules that allowed us nothing more than a “hello” as one of us was always on the way out as the other entered.
This made things a bit hard, but we managed to get through it via frequent communication and the occasional post-it note.
The day we did the photoshoot for the campaign was definitely entertaining because it was the first time that we were actually in the same place at the same time.
Seeing each other was nowhere near awkward though, because it was like we knew each other already. By the end of the photoshoot, we were already talking about meeting up to discuss important things like parking and why Mother Nature deceives Buffalo natives with such fluctuating weather.
Although we were a virtual team who sometimes shared the same desk, it felt good having the support of the other interns who were always doing something to enhance the effectiveness of the campaign.
The end result was an interactive website that the current “rookies” could be proud of.
All in all, the campaign was definitely a unique experience for me, which is something I’ll never forget.