MEC and Y&R

First week on the job went pretty well. So far I’ve learned a lot about media planning and working in an agency. Media buying definitely has a lot of perks to it. The guys invited me to this party that celebrated the 30th anniversary of this magazine Fashion Quarterly. It was pretty swanky, and it was at this AMAZING house out in the Wellington suburbs. To me this house looked like something out of Beverly Hills.
Apparently media planners get taken out and invited to parties like that pretty often, I guess its all about building those relationships. Steve was telling me today that relationships between media planers and media reps are really different in Wellington than most of the world. The way Steve was making it sound was if you go to Auckland, media planners put a lot of pressure on their media reps to get the deals they want. Where as in Wellington, Steve is actually friends with his media reps, and he hangs out with them all the time. He even plays football (American football) with his TV rep every Saturday. I guess people in Wellington are just more laid back, and they all follow that philosophy, "work to live, don’t live to work." Where as in Auckland, and maybe the U.S., life is a little more cut throat, especially in the ad business.

Right now at work, I’ve got two projects that I’m working on. The first seems pretty easy, all I have to do is research facebook and make a recommendation as to how a client should make their debut on the site. The second is a bit more difficult. I’m working on figuring out how many people in New Zealand watch sports. Specifically I have a huge list of sport teams and brands that I have to track down ratings for and give an estimate in thousands. Then I have give a price per thousand viewers for the each sport. This project wouldn’t be so hard if I was in the States, but being here I’m looking up teams and sports I have never heard of. Like the New Zealand Silver Ferns, which is a net ball team. I have no idea what netball is, or who the Silver Ferns, or if netball exists in the database I’m using. So what I have to do is look up their schedule for last year and go off that.

I’m sure I’ll get these both done by the end of next week, I’m just worried I’m going to look bad while doing it, or turn in a bad report. I’m sure I’ll be able to do it though, it can’t get that much harder. Plus, I could do the facebook one from my apartment on my laptop this weekend.

Speaking of the weekend.....it's here! Thus far the group and I have no travel plans. However, next weekend we might be going to Rotorua! Rotorua is a town a couple hours north of here that is famous for adventure sports and other cool stuff. Should be fun, but hopefully I'll be able to keep myself busy this weekend.