Carat Media Internship Journal: Entry #1

Yesterday I attended my first shift at Carat Media as a marketing intern, assigned to the subsidiary AMNET, a division based around analytics and one of Carat's smaller, more embryonic companies currently in a transitional phase of rapid expansion. The induction was interesting, being given a who's who talk on staff teams and their specialisations, the fire exits, where we could go for free food & drink! It was pretty much what I expected, sitting around one of the boardroom tables alongside fellow students, some of whom I knew, others maybe not so much. The vibrant atmosphere pulsed in every brilliantly-coloured room, with the occupying full-time staff members barely out of university themselves!

Awesome social areas with free coffee (above) and projector in the lobby showing the website (left.)

                                               

                                                                                        Very artistic walls!

But after the induction came a lecture on search, with the obvious search engine metrics covered in detail as well as an interesting insight into Carat's strategy in how they interpret and use the data, their rules of thumb and quality standards in SEM and the development of the industry as they have experienced it in recent times. I didn't attend the second half of the lecture and instead met with my manager and had a discussion with him and two other Agency Life students about display marketing, the metrics associated and their uses, the types of targeting that Carat specialise in, as well as a brief insight into how publishing works in terms of buying and selling ad space! Like the other members of staff, he was friendly and outgoing, relaxed yet paradoxically hardworking. 

After all the intros and tours I got some real work done. Arriving at the second floor, we were lead into one of the large open-plan offices filled with communal desks sitting in clusters amidst a white-walled room with cyan graffiti illustrating a catalogue of logos, from Twitter to the BBC. I worked from laptop, shown by a fellow employee how to access the Facebook Advertising account and how to download the data in Excel format. From here I noted data figures with disappointing Click Through Rates compared to their Cost per Click (and good stats too, of which there were several.) After ravaging three spreadsheets I wrote a report on one of them (around half a page,) in the time I had left detailing a general overview (the data was good overall with low CPC & average-above average CTR,) of the data before me. I examined a gender perspective by assorting the data (with a little help in using Excel's more complicated tools!) on the spreadsheet into the two categories, with overall spend and CPC, CTR etc. metrics. It felt like a productive day, I'd only been there working for around 2.5 hours yet I'd already gotten to grips with so much, like getting the pivot tables up in Excel, getting used to the correct formulas and calculations with repetition (Spend/Clicks= CPC; Clicks/Impressions= CTR!)

So how was my first day as an intern at Carat Media? Well, to be honest I can't really fault it so far, I'm genuinely hard-pressed to find anything that I disliked (apart from my misinterpretation of "smart-casual" leading to me being over-dressed!) I liked everything, the people, the environment, my manager, even the work! And it is for these reasons that I say that yesterday was was one of the best working days of my life and I hope you've found what I had to say positive? Inspiring? Or if you've experienced working with/at Carat before, just truthful? Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear it! Thanks for reading and sorry about the images, I had to use my phone but I'll improve the quality of the shots week.

Week 2