Carat Media Internship: Journal Entry #16

* For this time last week.

Work was pretty varied this week. I completed some more PowerPoint work and also carried out some more spend checks and I am pleased to say that I think I am finally getting the hang of it (I even altered the budget in the DSP this time!)

But the first thing I did during the day -after struggling with connecting to Google and LinkedIn to complete some work- was to join in a meeting about display advertising -a basics session in which we examined the progress made by both AMNET (which stands for Aegis Media Network, I learned,) as well as the wider industry. There were people from external organisations present who wished to use our services, with the meeting geared to such an end. It was very interesting, learning about how display advertising has developed this year, especially when considering mobile devices (due to take over desktops later this year) and the growth of the platform relative to search. This was accompanied by a historical underpinning of online marketing and advertising agencies, beginning in the late 1990s with portals controlled by companies such as AOL and MSN to the mid-2000s with third-party ad agencies and the present-future position of integrated agencies that offer clients the breadth of services, refusing to distribute client information, offering greater transparency as a result. It was all very informative and whilst I am detailing such a subject, I should also point out a good piece of news this week: That Carat has successfully gained Mastercard's advertising contract, winning $200 Mn of business as a result, a very exciting development.

But moving on I returned to the office and began work on a PowerPoint, a "Ratecard" to be exact, which is basically a document -based on The Guardian's template- that details the types of targeting available on certain platforms, namely Facebook & Twitter seeing as LinkedIn was unavailable for some bizarre reason.

Twitter Targeting Matrix

So after completing the two slides I moved onto my old enemy -the spend check! The dreaded spreadsheet started at me with its large green segments like some kind of complicated tax form, I first thought. But it didn't take long for me to get my head around exactly what to do with it: Just look on the DSP, see what the figures say and transfer it to the appropriate column within the sheet. Even the large green areas aren't anything scary, just areas contrasting with the pre-arranged white areas containing formulae to calculate averages and totals seamlessly as you insert the data, it's ingenious! This enabled me to see how much we spent in conjunction with the averages and budget remaining and I discovered as a result, a complication with pacing, which allowed me to make a necessary change to the daily budget in order to allow for better pacing with trends within that particular campaign and strategy, a beautifully-organised and efficient way of conducting things. 

Not So Bad After All: A Typical Spend-Check

After completing a couple of spend checks I finished the day off with a return to some Facebook tasks associated with ascertaining whether or not a creative for a client had passed its expiry date by looking into the ad placements via FB's ad tool on multiple spreadsheets ad looking for patterns in revenue losses i.e. had it lost far too much business over the last four months or so. This was to try and prove to our client to update their creative strategy to hopefully make our own work easier, because after all, if the image lacks appeal in the first place, no amount of strategic placing will deliver the results desired. Sadly, my examination returned inconclusive analysis, the creative dipping only in December, largely -I imagine- to its lack of seasonal appeal or that of its products for that matter, which is of no relevance seeing as the ads have returned to normal spends now. But at least we're delivering usual results as we should be doing, which you can't argue with.

And that concludes this week's tasks, with a variety of work completed and a large amount of experience gained. Next week I should be completing similar tasks which I hope bestow equally-fruitful experiences and chances to shine. 

Thanks for reading.