How Ninja Training Helped Me In Chicago (pt2)

Imagewest Spring 2009 Team

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From where I left off from last time, things at Imagewest started to get a little crazy.

About a month into the semester, the account team receieved what would become our main group project…a digital marketing plan. We were assigned to create a comprehensive digital plan for a Louisville-based museum covering strategy from web widgets, website design and social media marketing. Since there really was no template for this type of project, we had to basically create all this from scratch. This involved a TON of research and writing throughout the entirety of the semester.

In the meantime, I also played double-duty, working on a variety of different agency self-promotional videos involving our new mascot “the Ninja Gnome” (I bet you were wondering where the title “Ninja Training” was coming from…). The agency interns were referred to as “ninjas” and had the ninja gnome mascot for a few years but didn’t come to have a real live mascot until our spring semester. So when I wasn’t researching for our digital marketing plan, I was traveling around campus with the ninja gnome serving as his publicist.

The main video promo I worked on (aside from the “IW Trailer” on the previous blog post) was for the agency’s five year anniversary celebration. We were set to have an open house celebrating the five years and were using the video as part of a microsite promoting the event. After searching viral videos for inspiration, we found a high five montage on YouTube and decided that we would make a tribute to that video using the ninja gnome. We decided the theme of our open house would center around the video’s “High Five to Five Years” theme and built a campaign around that. After doing most of the filming within the week prior to spring break, we created the viral video featured at the bottom of this post.

Despite the hype around the fun ninja gnome videos, the digital marketing plan was not forgotten. We spent a lot of overtime hours writing up and polishing what was to become a 150-ish page digital plan to present to the museum at the end of the semester. After a lot of blood, sweat and tears (and no I don’t mean that metaphorically…I’m pretty sure I suffered a papercut at some point) we were ready to present our hard work to the museum during finals week via a conference call. The presentation ended up being time crunched and I unfortunately had a very rare blank out while it was my turn to present what I needed to (which was somewhat embarassing) but it all turned out well as a whole.

A less formal pic of the IW team

So how did all of this help me in Chicago?

With the networking opportunities that IW provides, I was able to get in contact with WKU alums in Chicago like Ralph Carey that kept in touch and gave me a lot of advice to living in Chicago before I made the move up here. Also, through an e-mail chain, another alum (my now co-worker) Mandy Mullins alerted our agency manager Heather Garcia about an open position at her company here in Chicago. To my luck, I found out about this position about a week before moving day, applied, got an interview my first Monday in town and was hired a few days later. The job description called for an individual with a broad knowledge of digital marketing and social media. Coincidentally I had submerged half my last semester in college in the research of that very thing. So all that hard work and knowledge gain made through the digital marketing plan helped me in the interview process tremendously and ultimately helped me gain a job right out of school.

Outside of getting a job, working at IW helped me get prepared for balancing outside-of-work life here in Chicago. In addition to all my work for IW, I also had to balance a full class load, running track for WKU, continuing work for the College Heights Herald as their Online Advertising Manager, and finding time to have some sort of a social life in between. So life was very hectic (yet fun) my last semester. I was forced to become a master at time management and multi-tasking skills. As it turned out, living in a city of 3 million people requires the same sort of energy. With an hour commute each way to work, balancing work here, a side job on Saturdays working at Bubba Gump Shrimp Co (for fun) and having a social life and routine outside of work, I have to constantly be on a treadmill of some sort. Many days of the week it is not unusual for me to leave my apartment at 6:45 to get to work on time and not return home for dinner until 9:30 that night. It’s an exhausting lifestyle but I’m 22, I can take it.

Plus, if I get too tired, there’s always coffee 🙂

How Ninja Training Helped Me In Chicago (pt1)

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Long story short, I randomly decided to move from Kentucky to Chicago in the spring. I moved up here with only a fallback waiting tables job and two weeks later landed a marketing  job with a $100 million incentive company getting paid to do what I used to get in trouble for doing in school. Sound lucky?

Well…it was (some may call it luck, I think it undoubtably divine intervention). However, with the only marketing/advertising experience I had being classroom work this time last year, the odds of quickly landing a post-grad job didn’t look good August 2008. Or even really January 2009. Then senior year happened.

Kicking off the fall of my senior year I started off as the Online Advertising Manager for the College Heights Herald (WKU’s campus paper). From that position I gained some advertising sales experience and learned how to attempt pitching business to clients and set up effective digital ad campaigns via the Herald’s website. I continued this throughout my entire senior year and definitely learned a lot from this experience. This experience also helped me gain a position at what would eventually consume my final spring semester: Imagewest.

After being turned down TWO other times before Spring of 2009, I finally landed a position at Imagewest (IW) as an account executive. I had tried for the Broadcast Coordinator position on those other occasions but with my time at the Herald I learned that I was actually a better fit for the account exec job. So after what would be my last long Christmas break (which included a random day trip to Chicago for pizza) I started my job training.

The first week actually was fairly easy and went by kind of slow to be honest. It mainly involved memorizing the agency portfolio so we could eventually present it to clients. This was actually somewhat challenging at first since the portfolio was fairly extensive and required quite a bit of memorization. After a week or so of that and general agency orientation, the real work slowly started to kick in. Before I knew it, I was spending more time working with agency related things than track and class combined…(which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing)

to be continued

Playing Catch Up (pt2)

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So this past Friday after getting off of work, I headed down to O’Hare and flew out to Cincinnati to see Megan for the weekend before she headed back to WKU. It turned out to be one of the most relaxed weekends I’ve had since moving up here. We spent a lot of time just chilling in her living room watching TV and working on crossword puzzles. I used to consider myself to be a relatively intelligent person until I worked on the weekend edition of the New York Times crossword. Man that was hard. I tip my hat to the individual that can complete it without the aid of the answers or Google.

The whole weekend wasn’t just crosswords and TV by any means though. That Saturday night we went her family into Cincinnati and munched on seafood and went to a Reds game. Actually getting to the stadium was pretty cool. We parked in Newport and took a ferry across the Ohio to the stadium. Plus, parking was only $3-$5 there as opposed to the $20-$40 you typically find up here around Wrigley Field. Great American Ballpark was a neat stadium to watch a game at and Megan’s dad ended up getting us pretty good seats. The Reds weren’t having one of the best games of their season that night but it was still a fun time. The highlight had to have been eating my first Skyline Chili Dog (pictured above). It was hands-down the messiest, but best tasting, chili dog I’ve had. I just won’t tell the people at Nicky’s about that (the diner I frequent on my lunch breaks here in Chicago, where I always get a chili dog).

On the ferry to the Reds game

That Sunday involved going to church, going out to an outdoor market and then Megan teaching me how to cook (and eat) scallops. I’m not a big seafood eater at all but I was pleasantly suprised at her scallops. I ended up liking them a lot (and not just because she made them)! The day before she taught me how to make granola and sent home a huge batch for me to munch on while at working at my desk. It’s a great office snack! It’s going to be about six weeks probably before we get to see each other again which is a bummer but I’ll probably be keeping myself busy here. Keeping busy means I’m making the most out of my time up here and also makes the time go by a lot quicker! Now I’m just looking forward to hanging out with my parents for a weekend up here on Labor Day. Just two more weeks!

On a random side note, over the weekend she and I watched some of the IAAF World Championships. More particularly watching Tyson Gay face off with Usain Bolt. Tyson Gay ran an incredible race, clocking in a 9.71, good enough for the American record and what would have been the world record this time last year. However, Bolt made the entire field look like high school JV sprinters by running 9.58. If you didn’t see it yourself, check this out:

Starbucks Free Pastry Effect

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So why do I have Kevin James ranting about muffins on here? To celebrate free Starbucks pastries! Today only Starbucks will be giving out free pastries…until 10:30 AM. You also have to buy a drink to go with it to get your pastry for free. Ok, so it’s not 100% free.

Oh yeah, you also have to print out this coupon and bring it with you. Are you like me and don’t have a printer? That’s okay, you can take your mobile device (iPhone, Blackberry) and show the coupon on there.

Wait, don’t have a PDA or other mobile device? Looks like you’re S.O.L. No free pastries for you.

Why do a free pastry day? Also, why make hoops to go through in order to get a free muffin? Starbucks is hurting a lot due to the economy (the thing we blame everything on) and stiffer competition from Dunkin Donuts and McDonald’s. The theory here (according to news articles) is to get people in the door and try their product, thinking that it will make them want to come back for more. However, most of the publicity for this is word-of-mouth. Anyone who has ever played the telephone game as a kid knows that word-of-mouth only provides us with so much detail and accuracy. The word of mouth will get people (like me) in the door to get something free. Many of those people will probably not know that it’s dependent on having that printed coupon with you, or that it’s only until 10:30, or that you have to buy a drink with it.

That’s okay though. The promotion gets people in the door. Even if people go in there for a free pastry and can’t get it for one reason or another, they will probably have the philosophy “Well, I came all the way here, might as well get something.” They may not find exactly what they are looking for (free food) when they come in, but the fact still remains: they came in the door. It’s kind of like if I titled this post “Lance Armstrong drops out of the Tour de France.” Sure people would click on a link out of curiosity but they wouldn’t find what they were looking for (because it’s not true at all). Still,  the fact remains that I would see a huge spike in traffic on my blog.

So after this free pastry day, what’s next for Starbucks? Rumor has it that they will be serving select beers and wines in the future in addition to coffee. This is already done at several coffee shops up here in Chicago, so it’s not like Starbucks will be ahead of the curve with this idea.

Ask yourself after reading this: “Is he really that concerned with the marketing efforts of Starbucks? Or was he just looking for some excuse to put a video of Kevin James talking about muffins on his blog?” I’ll let you decide that for yourself.

Carpe diem. Seize the day today. Go get a free muffin.

You Only Live Once, Make Sure It’s Enough

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These past two weeks have been absolutely exhausting but awesome. In seven days time I have been to the Art Institute of Chicago twice, Millenium park on a few occasions, Lincoln Park Zoo, the Magnificent Mile several times, Navy Pier, seen Transformers 2 at the IMAX, seen the Cubs play the Cards at Wrigley, picnicked in Lincoln Park, been to the top of the Sears (…I mean Willis) Tower, ridden on an architecture tour boat,  been to Ernest Hemingway’s birthplace, seen several homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, listened to a Rascal Flatts concert from my rooftop, worked a 40 hour week and probably have walked 30+ miles in the process.

What was the occasion? Back to back guests. My girlfriend Megan flew up here a little over a week ago to see me. Despite our occasional bad luck facing crowds, it was an amazing weekend and I’m really thankful she was able to make it up here. Then this past weekend my teammate/rommate from WKU Ben came up to hang out and explore the city, which was also a great weekend with a good friend. For both weekends, I figured while they were here, they should see as much of Chicago that they wanted to. After all, I lived here, I could see all this stuff whenever.

Megan and I at the Buckingham Fountain

Then I thought…even though I lived near all these neat (and a lot of it free or relatively cheap) experiences, and theoretically I could see them whenever, most of the stuff I did with Megan and then Ben was the first time for me too. I was just as (if not more so) the tourist with them the past couple of weekends, and here I was the “local” one. It took having out of town guests for me to go explore and do something unique. The “it’s now or never” attitude that got me up here initially seemed to have been cast aside due to real life (work, errands, paying bills etc).

I’ve redecided to do something random more often. That doesn’t mean I’m throwing out responsibility with life, money, time etc. Just making a point to do something unique, fun or random a little more often than I had been, say things I want to say, and just stop and look around once in a while.

Ben and I at the Sears Tower Skydeck

The summer will be gone before I know it and a Chicago winter, from what I’ve heard, will more than likely put a damper on city exploration. There’s a lot more to life than 8-5 (even though that’s an important part to life) and I’m intend to learn more about it. What about you?

Why Bad Things Happen To Good People (pt2)

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Okay, so here’s the twisted road that got me here to Chicago…

Smokey Mountain Summer Project

First off, college internships. The summer going into my senior year of college I knew that a summer internship somewhere would be a good resume boost going into graduation. My first and main focus was interning at Nike for the summer, either in NYC, Chicago, or their world headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon. After talking to a few friends and contacts at home, I eventually made a contact with someone who worked for Nike and would potentially be a huge asset as far as getting me on board there. In addition to Nike, I was also pitching for a marketing internship with the Titans Radio station in Nashville.

While all this is going on, my CRU bible study leader kept pushing a CRU summer project and how I should look into it. He said it wouldn’t hurt to apply. After dragging my feet for a while waiting on my “real” prospects, I ended up filling out the summer project application online for the Smokey Mountain project in Gatlinburg, TN. It was a “fallback” option in the unlikely event one of the other “resume boosting” options fell through. I figured a summer in the mountains would be good for my last cross country season. As that spring progressed, the doors at Nike gradually started to close and I kept feeling a tug to spend my summer in Gatlinburg. It was like God was saying “this is where you need to be,” which made no sense because I was thinking “practically” and wondered how a summer in the mountains would help my resume or job prospects graduating in a year. Eventually, after more doors started to close at Nike, I finally listened to God. My thinking was “This sure won’t help my career but if God keeps pulling at me to go, there must be something he knows that I don’t.” I chose to do summer project and didn’t even wait to hear back from the other Nike and Titans opening that were left. A huge portion of my faith was riding on my summer experience.

God did not disappoint. He definitely knew something I did not. That summer ended up being hands-down the best summer of my life. I was blessed to serve on the leadership team and worked part time at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company serving tables. Working at Bubba’s was the best summer job I have ever had and eventually opened doors for me later on. Despite what I thought (not that this was the point of going on summer project) summer project ended up being a huge resume booster. Having spent a summer doing things for other people seemed to stand out to several people who helped me revise my resume and stood out to my current employer in the interview process. I honestly didn’t see that coming! Also, through my work at Bubba Gump’s, I was able to gain a job opportunity at the Bubba’s here in Chicago to pay bills until I found the career job I was looking for. My experiences from that summer alone helped open up so many doors post-graduation that I didn’t even fathom possible at the time I committed to going. I was very disappointed with not getting my “dream internships” and thought my post-graduation plans were going to be more bleak as a result of it. God knew better though. It’s nice to be proven wrong now and again.

Imagewest

While on the subject of resume building, let’s talk Imagewest. This was a unique advertising internship program that our school offered that was the only one like it in the country. Obviously, I wanted in. My junior year I applied to get into the program…and failed. So obviously, I dusted myself off and tried again the following semester…and was rejected a second time. A person can only take so much rejection from the same source. So finally, going into the last semester of college, I applied again and got in! God’s timing was evident in that, although I didn’t really see it until graduation.

During that semester is when I decided, though I couldn’t explain why, that I was going to move to Chicago. I had never been there before that semester so the move really didn’t make a whole lot of logical sense at the time. Being the planner that I am, I started looking at opportunities in the Chicago area. Through Imagewest that semester, I was able to make some contacts with professionals in my field who worked in the Chicago area. Then CRU just happened to be going on a Chicago mission trip that spring break, which I jumped in on. In addition to that, through my agency manager having a former student who worked here in Chicago at Hinda Incentives, I found out about a job opening a week before my moving day up here. I ended up applying for that job and landing it after a week being up here.

…to be concluded…

Why Bad Things Happen To Good People (pt1)

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In the past month I have made the transition from being a student and dependent on mom and dad for most of life’s necessities to becoming a “real person.” Generally speaking, it has been an overwhelmingly smooth transition. I honestly don’t think things could be working out a whole lot better right now. Early this spring, I (somewhat randomly) decided that my post-graduation plans involved moving to Chicago. I didn’t have any concrete plans, job offers, or any reason to go, I just felt like that was the place to go. I’d never lived in a big city before and my philosophy was “I’m 22, unmarried, no career at home, if I don’t do something like this now…I never will.”

…and things pretty much went my way. I had a friend who wanted to move up here with me and split rent and we got an extremely good deal on a place to live in the Lakeview/Wrigleyville area. I landed one “pay rent” job at Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. Then while I was re-training there I landed a career-type job as a marketing coordinator with Hinda Incentives, a job opening that basically popped up overnight with the hiring process happening almost as quick. My family backed me up with my plans from the beginning, and even though the idea in itself was a bit crazy and gutsy to start, they never tried talking me out of it. To top it off I was (still am) dating a girl that was very supportive of the move and has never complained once about me moving away from her.

So….to sum it up…I have two jobs that I got pretty quickly in a slow economy, a roof over my head, a supportive family, beautiful girlfriend, friends from home that still keep in touch and several new friends here in the city as a result of running clubs and MissioDei (the church I attend here). Everything seems to be lining up almost perfectly at this point in my life (for now…hopefuly this blog doesn’t jinx me).

Why title this blog “Why Bad Things Happen To Good People”? Seems kinda contradictory right?

It was all the bad things, closed doors, stressful events and other rough patches in life that over time eventually set me up for the good fortune that I’ve experienced the past few months. In the past it seemed like after I conquered one thing, some new difficult challenge shortly followed. My next post will elaborate a bit more on specifics. I figured saying it all in one post would be way too much.

The main thing I feel like I’ve learned so far is that bad stuff does happen and/or things won’t go the way you planned, but not because life sucks. All the negative experiences could eventually prepare you to be ready for some really good stuff later on, even though it hardly ever seems like it at the time. It took  several years for me to finally see why things sometimes happen the way they do.

…to be continued…