Khue Ngo Blog #3

My Take on Current Events: Pinterest is entering the money-making business 

I assume we all read the news about Pinterest introducing promoted pins. When searching for a certain key word, or just randomly browsing categories, you might find pins that will show products on sale. But apparently, they have not limited their commercial activities to just that.

The other day, I received an e-mail from Pinterest saying that a skirt that I pinned months ago is now on sale and 43% off.

(sorry, the e-mail is in German but I think you get the gist…)

So not only are they promoting pins now, they also send you actual advertising. Are they moving too fast? Yes, at least for my taste. I consider Pinterest as a platform to collect and share the things you are interested in, not an online shop - even though they only direct you to other websites to make the purchase. However, I felt negatively surprised by that e-mail as I do not need yet another website informing me about special sales. 

My TTIY Observations

This week, I took a look at the American Eagle in-store advertisements.

They are promoting their special sales with big signs in the windows saying 60 % off. Instead of using their typical font, they wrote the “60 %” off in the style of the subway line icons. I think that this way people automatically pay more attention to it as it is catching the eye, and riding the subway is probably something the target audience (girls 15-25) is doing regularly. Two of the e-mails I received this week were in line with the in-store advertisement and showed the same sign (but promoting a different sale).

I also took a closer look at the AE blog this week. The blog is in the style of the American Eagle website. It is kept white and clean with big pictures of people wearing AE apparel. However, they use another logo as their key visual: Instead of the American Eagle logo, they display “Live your life” in big handwriting-style letters in the top left corner of the blog. The “V” in “live” is replaced by the Eagle. These three words are the hashtag they promote in their e-mails as mentioned last week.

There have been four blog entries this week. They also mostly consist of very little text and large pictures of people wearing AE clothes. These are more amateur-like than on the actual website, though. It seems like the pictures are taken with a regular digital camera or even with a phone by the bloggers themselves.

The topics range from a special Aerie Ribbon Build event, to Fitness Friday, to a special feature about an AE Blazer.

It is not obvious who is blogging. You do not know if it is one person or an entire team. I will start reading the blog regularly in order to find out more about the author and to see if there is a certain pattern in the choice of topics that might reveal a communications strategy.

My Recap

I have to say that I was very positively surprised by our visit at McCann.

As an agency with 19,000 employees, I expected it to be very impersonal and anonymous. However, the atmosphere encountered there really appealed to me.  In particular, I liked the fact that each team sits together at one “desk island”. This is something that I find more attractive than the cubicle style that we saw at TargetCast last week. That is why I was really surprised: McCann as such a huge company offered something more personal than the comparatively small company.

I was really impressed by their work and liked it very much. During the entire course of my undergraduate studies I actually wanted to go into the advertising field. However, when I was looking for internships, the offer for the PR internship was more interesting, which is why I ended up in Public Relations.

Now, it would be really interesting for me to “go back” into advertising in order to see if it fits me as well or even better than PR.

Many of the things about client relations that Grant mentioned are well-known to me, as I have personally encountered such situations during the past three years. I guess there is not a big difference between advertising or PR clients. The workload and required flexibility in terms of office hours sounded very familiar as well.

From the descriptions of the different roles in an advertising agency, I could imagine that the Account Executive position would suit my skills very well. I like organizing, coordinating and bringing everything together. However, I am also very intrigued by the Planner position. I am definitely not creative enough to work in the creative department, but I really enjoy participating in the development of ideas. The process described in our last readings about the creative brief very well depicted a task that I would enjoy: Developing a guide for the creative team that includes the clients wishes and deliver a first creative direction.