Khue Ngo Blog #5

My Take on Current Events:

Foursquare offers ads for all businesses now

Foursquare, the social “check-in” platform, is now opening up their ad space for all businesses.Stores and shops can promote their venue or special deals to potential customers that are in the area. When the people open up the app to search for “pizza” for example, promoted locations for this category that are nearby will appear at the top of the search results. This is basically the same thing as the paid links at the top of Google search results.

Funny thing, as I said in class, I do not really trust the Google ads on top of the results. However, I like the promoted locations in Foursquare. I guess that is because when I google something, I want to get the “earned” results that were found by the Google logarithms. With Foursquare, the top results are the ones with the best ratings around your location. If the promoted location offers me a special deal, I would gladly go there if their rating is not too bad.

My TTIY Project

So this week I observed American Eagle’s Pinterest activities. They just started their “AE Holiday 2013” campaign. For this campaign, they use young males and females that fit into their target audience, to present their new collection. Each of them got their own Pinterest board titled “Meet Hanna: AE Holiday 2013” or “Meet Jacob:…” and so on. The board descriptions tell us a little bit about every one of them. An example would be “Meet Hanna, a film student from Orlando, FL featured in American Eagles' Holiday 2013 campaign.”

They featured 12 different characters, each of them presenting different AE clothes. All of them were presented on the AE Blog as well, but only two of them were specifically featured on Facebook.  Yet, pictures of six of the characters now serve as the “cover photo” on the AE Facebook and Twitter profile page. In addition to that, the AE Blog published a “Behind the Scenes” feature of the AE Holiday 2013 photo shooting.

Besides that campaign, Facebook showed several pictures of celebrities wearing AE this week, including Jessica Alba and Drew Barrymore.

Also, they have been promoting a 40% off sale for all of their items. This sale ended Oct 15^th, but now they are offering a 60% off sale in stores and online.

My Recap

I was really excited about our visit to Cohn & Wolfe. I have worked in PR for the past three years. However, the work I have done was very focused on press events. That is why I wanted to see what goes on in a “normal” PR agency.

My first impression: Mixed feelings.

From what they all presented I can say that I like the work as such. Yet, as a few of us mentioned in class, it felt very healthcare focused, which is an industry that I don’t think I would enjoy much. Also, I do not want to specialize in Social Media.

I really liked the case that Amy presented and the Optic White event during Fashion Week. One goes into the branding direction that I would love to explore, and one into the event direction that I already know and love. I guess both do not really represent traditional PR. I know that I do not want media monitoring to be the biggest part of my job. I want to work on the “input side”, and not only watching at what comes out in the end. I know that monitoring is a crucial part, but not the part that makes me want to work in this field.

As to the company culture: I think I am still overwhelmed by what we saw at McCann two weeks ago, which set very high expectation standards for any future office visits.

Apart from that, I was very surprised that they shared the 7^th floor with another agency that works for healthcare. From my experience I know that absolutely everything is confidential (even if everybody already knows and talks about it), and whenever there was an external visitor that took a tour of the office, all employees were informed and urged to put away anything that could reveal confidential information.

As for spacing, the work places were not really cubicles but still, everybody was kind of to themselves. Furthermore, I did not see a big common area where colleagues could meet and socialize, even though they mentioned that they often have agency internal gatherings.

I really liked what Chaz said about the learning and growing opportunities at Cohn & Wolfe. The agency supports its people and offers them the possibilities to prove themselves, and learn and improve as much as they want.

Regarding our internship, I do not think that Cohn & Wolfe would be a good choice. As Helen said, their summer internship program is structured as an introduction to PR for people that do not know anything about the industry. I do not think that I will learn much in such a program. It would be interesting though to see what other PR agencies offer as a summer internship.

ADD ON:
Regarding the question of whether they are exclusively a PR agency or more of a marketing communications firm, I would definitely say the latter. Many things that they presented do not count as "traditional" PR, meaning handling relationships with the media, writing press releases and so on. For example the campaign Amy was presenting was not a classic PR campaign, but could be counted into the field of brand positioning. Moreover, the Optic White event they were talking about also seemed untraditional for PR.
Taking all of this into consideration, the scope of their practice is much bigger, as they have to cover many different areas that now contribute to traditional PR.
One challenge they have to face that we were also discussing was the balancing act between doing everything in a timely manner, and having everything approved by the client. With today's digital media, it is expected that one delivers on the spot information. However, it is also very important to consult with the client before communicating. Yet, the digital media is also a very huge opportunity for them to reach out to more people, react and interact with them, and have a relationship with the media and the public itself.