Jim Key - Director of Global Marketing at Intrax Internships Abroad
Today’s guest post is brought to you by Jim Key, Director of Global Marketing at Intrax Internships Abroad. Last year, Jim took us through the international job searching funnel starting by preparing for a job abroad, researching potential employers and turning those findings into potential interviews. Now that you know the process, it’s time to narrow down your focus and chose your industry. In this guest post, Jim will teach you about the advertising industry and what you can expect working in the field.
In last fall’s series of guest blog posts, we went through how to find an internship overseas and turn it into a job. This winter we will look at a few different industries and why you might consider them for an international internship.
Top Ad Agency in Madrid - Courtesy of Jim Key
Our first industry is Advertising – starting with full service advertising agencies and other firms that have similar models such as PR agencies, branding boutiques, social media agencies, and others. For simplicity, I’ll just call them “Ad agencies”, but you’ll know that term includes several other niches. In addition to meeting with ad agencies all over the US & Canada over the years (in my career before Intrax), I have met with agencies all over Europe regarding summer internships for students. These organizations help their clients (from big global brands to the local ballet) to create, plan, and deliver advertising campaigns as well as other marketing tactics – everything from reaching out to journalists in the hope of getting media coverage (PR), to improving a website in order to drive more traffic (Search Engine Optimization – SEO), consulting on media buying, direct mail & e-mail campaigns, and much more. This industry includes lots of jobs in creating messages and delivering them to an audience. The workflow at ad agencies predominantly falls into three areas:
- Account Services – managing the relationships with existing clients, new business development
- Creative – creating content, from copywriters to graphic artists
- Planning – determining what the message and medium should be for a given campaign
There are several reasons that we place quite a few students in this space.
1) Ad Agencies are fun places to work – they have a creative buzz, young teams, international staff (often), and lots going on. There are usually more projects than the team can handle – new business pitches, campaigns to create, consumers to test, etc. It just makes for a dynamic environment.
2) Ad Agencies provide broad exposure (helping students figure out what they like) – most students are still considering several options for their future: advertising, corporate marketing, creating content, developing strategy, optimizing ad placement, etc. At an agency, students not only see more than most about how their host company works, they also get a view into how their clients work. Because of their structure, the ad agency internship environment provides interns with more visibility to more parts of the business and experience that transfers to other businesses. The goals of an internship are to get experience, figure out what you want to do, and make yourself more valuable for the next internship or job. Ad agency internships can fit those goals better than most.
3) Advertising interns can add value more easily – spending a lot of time on Facebook may not help you in class or on tests, but a high level of familiarity with the medium (Facebook, Smart Phone applications, and other advertising venues) and being “tech native” can help get you up the learning curve faster in an advertising job. Nothing makes an internship fun like the feeling that you made a difference and added something to the conversation.
4) Job Opportunities – agencies can grow quickly with the acquisition of a new client or staff turnover. When an ad agency finds interns who prove themselves as hard workers with good ideas, they can make an impression. Several companies have commented to me that their North American interns showed a stronger work ethic and more initiative than some of their European counterparts. I noted above that agencies are young – in other words, they tend to have more entry level jobs than some other industries do.
Final note: Over the last few years, I have met many Communications, Marketing, Advertising and Graphic Arts majors who have told me that they have trouble finding ad agency internships in the US & Canada. Of course, finding a full-time job is even harder without experience because there are a lot of Communications and Marketing majors out there. Any international experience will give you lots of stories to share with friends. You can imagine that those students whose international experience is an advertising internship simply have that many more stories that they can also share in an interview.
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