I see 101

From my desk!
Aaah yes, my internship. I was fortunate enough to get a lot of help and set this up at DraftFCB for my time in Taiwan. I had been checking out the account management side of things for a while, but there are so many pieces that work together in an advertising agency, which makes my time every Thursday very interesting. Let me start off with the commute.

I leave my room in the morning at about ten minutes to 6 and walk to the bus stop. The sun is rising and the air is usually pretty clean, so I can see the big mountains off in the distance. It makes the morning hater in me pretty happy. The free High Speed Rail shuttle takes me to the train, then it's about an hour to get to Taipei. From there it's a pretty quick rapid transit train ride to the stop where I walk about 20 minutes to work. The way back is a little more messy because I save money and take the bus. By the end of the day, I've commuted for about 6-7 hours! It's not so bad once a week, but it definitely makes me want to live within biking distance from work for my first job.

Day 1 involved meeting everyone, learning a bit about what the account people do, and sitting through some meetings. Most of the communicating is done in Chinese, which really helps me practice, even if there are times that I am lost. Lots of people there speak English, and better than I speak Chinese, so it isn't too hard to ask questions. An interesting thing I see with the people I sit near is that most of the emails are done in English. I think a lot of clients have some English speaking employees, even when the majority of things are done in Chinese.

Meeting #1 was pretty short. They made some ads for 3M water filters a while back, but the new filter doesn't look the same, so they need to re-shoot the picture. This was my first lesson in the importance of lighting. For this ad, the picture will be shot without a label and the label will be added via computer because of the glare they would get.

The second meeting involved the account team and the creative team. The accounts director Arthur was giving the creative team a briefing on the product to be advertised: Nexcare 3M face masks. Many of you know that these things are way popular in Asian countries, which makes it a plenty big market to get into. What I like about the account side of the job is that these people need to be involved with every step of the process, and they really keep it flowing. This briefing was to introduce what the client had in mind for their product, as well as teach the creative team everything they needed to know about these face masks. The quality, what they're made of, how much they cost, the target market, where the ads will be, what makes it better than the competition... Arthur has to know it all, which I think is pretty cool.

The final meeting was with a bunch of people from the office and the production company that was shooting a commercial for some more 3M products: Scotch Brite scouring pads. This was the final meeting between both sides before shooting began, so they basically went over finishing touches and some last ideas anyone had. Luckily for me, the commercial was shot the following Thursday, and they all let me check it out.

Coming up: Day two at the commercial shoot and Day three- my first project.

Oh by the way, I went to the bike shop across town and rented a bike the other day. They have a really fun bike path and it's pretty cheap. I had pictures but my external harddrive and iphoto collaborated against me and decided to lose all of my pictures from Taiwan. Actually, the only new pictures I have from here are two of me sporting a mustache. Yeah.