The Red Tettemer Experience, Let’s Ride!
Hey guys! My name is Ashley. During this experience, I learned so much about advertising agencies that I was completely unaware of beforehand. I interned at an agency called Red Tettemer O’Connell and Partners. This is an all around creative agency that works with multiple platforms daily. They provide full service advertising to their clients. Throughout my time here, I realized just how busy agency life truly is. The account department is constantly dealing with phone calls, e-mails, meetings and clients. It opened my eyes to show me that I am in the perfect field for my interests.
I shadowed an Account Manager named Bergan. She was great. She knew how to juggle so many clients at once and knew how to make herself well rounded when it came to pleasing the clients. Although an account management position doesn’t require things such as creative ideas and event planning, Bergan took on all obstacles. I watched her plan a conference from beginning to end. The conference was HUGE and located in Las Vegas! RTO&P (Red Tettemer O’Connell and Partners) flew her out to supervise the event. She was there for about a week and everything turned out wonderful! She made me understand that in her field, there are no such things as off days. She got sick for about a week while I was interning and still managed to place herself into phone conferences and answer e-mails and questions. She truly is a great role-model in the advertising field!
I met some clients, but mostly listened in on some phone conferences due to the clients being in other states. I enjoyed listening to the clients’ desires and watching how the agency took all the projects from start to finish. Although many times I had a lot of down time, I still enjoyed learning about client companies and researching to find out more about them. Many times I was asked to do a lot of administrative work, but others I was asked to organize layouts of presentation decks, develop work orders and apply tasks on the task work hub called “Basecamp.”
As an intern, we were required to work on a company’s product. We were asked to create a way for a shoe company that is very unknown to become a well-known and desired shoe by the public. It was extremely hard because John (the founder and creator) had almost no budget. His shoes were amazing and so was his work, but he had very little to show and almost no social following. My team, a group of five interns, competed with another group to see who could come up with the better campaign. MY GROUP WON! It took so many times of returning to our original ideas and fixing and editing them before we landed on the solid winning platform. I was so proud of my team! I got pretty close with the other interns because of this project. Also, it allowed me to venture our into the other departments and meet people in the company other than specifically account positions.
I do wish I had the time to meet with more clients and potentially could have gone off scene and met with them for their pitches, but because most of Bergan’s clients were in other states, it made it close to impossible. I’m happy I got to see how a real account manager works through their daily tasks and I feel as though I am much more prepared now than I was before my internship. I am so pumped to work in the field! I can’t wait.
