Two month placement at Brass

The day begins at 9am, for me this usually involves grabbing a strong coffee from the filter machines and checking my emails; in a bid to jump start my brain into action (I am not a morning person, and often annoyingly come up with ideas in bed). The turn over of briefs is fast here, but it means you automatically work faster and don't stew on something for too long (loosing sight of what you're doing in the process). The briefs have included food brands, a recruitment ad (to help me work on my art direction), a fruit (!), health stuff and a keep Britain tidy campaign to encourage people to pick up their dog's crap...glamorous eh. The creative department are very keen to share the words of wisdom, which is nice - perhaps they remember the graduate wilderness too? A recurring theme is, everyone has their own opinion on what is right and what is wrong; about my book (digital or hard copy, case study or no case study), about the work I'm doing there for them...everything really. I know this happens at uni in terms of the creative work - it seems it doesn't go away in industry. So for me, this means having the balls to decide for myself what I think is right or wrong after asking other's opinions. As well as working in the creative department, I've also been gaining (valuable) experience in the digital department. They've taken me to meetings about social media strategy and online communication strategy (which did involve quite a bit of me not knowing a lot of the jargon words - but it was learning). There was opportunity for me to have my voice listened too (which if you know me, you know I quite like talking - so this was good). Having said that, I only spoke when I was absolutely sure I should. But people liked what i had to say. It gave me a bit of confidence - maybe I can actually do this in the real world. The days are long, but the weeks go fast. The office is relaxed, which means I can get into my own creative flow, and don't notice 5.30 come around. Alas, the road to creative employment is long it seems, and the creative world is bigger and expecting more of me than I realised sat in the studio at LCA; but the nice people at Brass are encouraging me to better my book...this is what I am concentrating on in the 2 months I'm placed here. Lauren. I'll upload a picture soon. Janine, i don't like how all of the text is bunched up together - makes it very hard to read stuff on here :/

at Brass

Our placement at Brass is quite intense, we’re already working on a second brief.

‘Office work’ can be exhausting, but at the same time, rewarding.

There’s a hairy rhino, a huge melon and some golden cats distracting us from work. 

We are receiving good feedback.

At the end of the day our eyes are red, our hands coloured in markers and what we say doesn’t make any sense anymore.

We are living on coffee and sandwiches.

Our 4 hours of Facebook a day have been reduced to half an hour in the evening.

No lazy mornings and no ‘Let’s go for a pint’.

But we’ve been coming up with more ideas than ever!

Bianca and Danielle

Day in the life of...Creative Interns (Jac & Chris)

We are a creative team interning at Mortierbrigade, Brussels.

I guess the place to start with our particular internship is before we even get into the agency.

While we are here we are living in the Mortierbrigade Hotel. It's a big house inside the agency's compound (it used to be a brewery). It has three different rooms on different floors and they get nicer the higher you go. They have different themes and it's a pretty cool place to stay, check it out here http://www.mortierbrigadehotel.com/

So to the actual day. We start off with possibly the shortest commute ever. Five seconds of arduous walking gets us from the hotel's front door into the agency.

The Belgians are fairly laid back with arrival times, 9.15-9.45 seems to be the ok time to turn up. However we like to represent the British 'kill yourself before you're 40' work ethic and usually get in before 9.

The first point of contact is the bar. Time to get the coffee going and find out what the word is on the advertising streets.

We then walk up the stair case of lights to where the creative teams and planners have their desks. We have our own over sized desk complete with faulty but comfortable chairs.

The obligatory check of the e-mails/blogs/social networks then happens. If we have a brief going we will work separately on it until about 11.30. The office is pretty open plan and everyone keeps the chatter to a quiet hum. So when we need to spar loudly over some ideas it's time to go to a client meeting room or outside.

As far as the briefs go, we have been put on a wide range of brands and medias. We have worked on script writing for a 'come dine with me' style TV spot. Guerilla and ambient ideas for a beer brand and indie radio station. Art direction for a snack print ad and copy for T-Shirts for a bank's summer party.

Our afternoon to evening consists of getting ideas presentable in some form for a review at the end of the day. This is either with a creative team who we are working with or the pant-wetting experience of presenting to the top dog, Jens Mortier. Don't get me wrong, he is one of the friendliest guys you'll meet. But your genius idea starts to lose its glow when you realise you are presenting it to a man who has more Lions than the Serengeti.

This routine is punctuated with requests to 'image source' for print ads and layout tasks.

We leave the agency at around 18.30 and sometimes head off to a bar to sample yet another of Belgium's thousands of beers.

Day in the Life

Well done to level six students on their Coming Soon mention on the IPA Gradvantage blog. While I was having a look for the posting (which is coming soon ha ha) I noticed that the Gradvantage blog has a 'day in the life' tag. So, all the postings under the tag are written by students who've been on placements in agencies playing a role e.g. Art Director. Such posts will give insights into the experience of creative advertising, which, I think you may agree could be very valuable to you. Also, I thought this is a great way of using our course blog.  I mentioned this to Jennifer (L5) who has just come back from BBH and Jack and Chris (L6) who are currently undertaking an intern at Mortierbrigade, so they can launch our Day in the life series. So here's how we can do it, while on placements keep a blog of your experiences, then simply copy and paste one of these posts onto the course blog.  Over to you Jennifer, Chris and Jack...