“What are you looking to get out of this placement?”
I leaned back in the chair in James’ office and considered his question. It was a sunny August morning and the first day of my 2 month internship at Organic Development.
“I suppose I want to get an insight into what you do, and help on the creative side of things when I can.”
James, the agency’s director, nodded in approval.
“Cool.”
At the time of writing, I’m sitting at my desk with its view of the River Exe, sipping a mug of tea and trying to remember everything I’ve been working on over the past few weeks. As I flick back through my notebook - an organised mess of doodles, written drafts and spider diagrams - I can see I’ve been busy.
On my first day, I didn’t have much time after my meeting with James before I was tasked with writing some golf-related copy for a hotel website. After getting briefed by Andrew and receiving a quick lesson in search engine optimisation (writing so your site ranks higher in web searches) from Ross, I got stuck in. A few hours of research and re-drafting later (shall I describe the green as “quick” or “closely cropped”?), I handed in a final version that made it onto the site. Not a bad start.
My next project brief was a biggie. James asked me to come up with a name, logo, brand strategy and some web content for a top-secret new project hot off the presses at ODHQ. I got started straight away, but I found out quickly that one of the biggest challenges was coming up with a name that was available as both a .com and a .co.uk web domain. Even with the help of nifty services such as www.nameboy.com, it took a long time and a considerable amount of head scratching before I struck gold. I think we should be grateful that there’s not a similar process in naming babies. If it were, “Tom” would have undoubtedly prompted the hair-tearing “domain already in use” message, forcing my parents to opt for some derived combination of letters, numbers and punctuation marks. I would have ended up as t0-m989 or something.
Anyway, I digress. The branding project is ongoing, and the new product will be revealed soon enough. In the meantime, I’ve been helping out on some other projects, one of the coolest of which has been a design for a billboard. Thanks to the lovely folks at Best Of Exeter, Organic Development had been given an extra large space on an advertising hoarding. We just needed to think of what to put on it. After some initial brainstorming, James had the idea of making the ad interactive by implementing augmented reality technology. I’d read about AR before as a component of big budget campaigns, but I’d never seen it used in the local area.
Here’s how it works: the board contains a QR code (similar to a barcode, but composed of squares instead of lines) which will direct anyone who points their smartphone at it to a web page containing media content. A similar concept was recently showcased on Five’s The Gadget Show, except their advert involved a billboard with an integrated camera and LCD screen. And a leather-clad Suzi Perry. We don’t have either.
All in all I’m getting on well here at Organic Development and I’m looking forward to fulfilling my latest role as in-house blogger. Expect daily industry-related news, rants, interviews, musings and, if I run out of ideas, shameless links to cool stuff.
This is my idea of an internship. It’s definitely better than photocopying.
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