Superb Sydney placement

I’m currently in my final semester of a PR and Marketing degree at Curtin in Perth. I decided to go into PR after working as a journalist for a year where I learned a lot about the industry and thought that I would prefer to give up a cadetship and live the uni life basically! I decided to do my internship over East because there are more opportunities to get into the fashion PR industry over there. All the major magazine titles and there are heaps of small boutique agencies to supply them with all the fabulous products we see in their pages! Plus my older sister has bought me a return ticket for my 21st to go over and see her there so I figured spending a month living with her and her partner would be excellent! She works at Marie Claire as the senior fashion writer, so she gave me some insight to what exactly goes on in the industry.

My placement was with a small boutique PR firm called Polkadot PR, located in Surry Hills. They deal with mostly fashion, beauty and quirky products, with a number of clients providing really interesting opportunities to pitch stories to magazines. The first day I was there I started working on EAVs (which translate to Estimated Advertising Values) which I would soon grow to despise. They are basically a system of showing clients how much the coverage they received would be worth if they had of taken out advertising with the publication, instead of using PR. I soon learnt that if you want to take out advertising with some of the more expensive publications or widely read newspapers you need a small fortune to fund it.

I was lucky that one of the girls now working there also did work experience before she was hired, so she knew what to get me to do and how to break things up and make it a little bit more interesting for me. On my first day I went with her into ACP Magazine headquarters on Park Street in the Sydney CBD (which is the place where most magazines like Cleo, Cosmo, Madison, Grazia, Girlfriend etc are all located). We met a shoe client of ours called Mileno there and set up a showroom of their new season shoes. Then the magazine fashion assistant and market editors from the magazines came and chose which ones they wanted sent to them to shoot. It was amazing to be so in the middle of it so quickly and to see how easily things like that are actually done. It was an excellent opportunity to meet and greet the people who you will be basically trying desperately to like your products and put them in their pages. It was also great to meet the Mileno designer and hear about how she draws inspiration for her collections and how she got to design the shoes for the Australian athletes at the opening and closing ceremonies as this year’s Olympics. Being nice to client and journos are equally as important because without clients you have nothing to pitch to journos and would be out of business.

It really illustrated to me how essential it is to be a personable and likeable person, if you meet a fashion editor and get off on the wrong foot they will forever remember your name and face for all the wrong reasons. You have to be professional but also show that you have personality, because when it comes down to it you can be a great PR practitioner but editors, journos and fashion assistants are all human and they want to form a professional relationship with someone who has a personality and is able to have a chat about things other than just work; PR is all about communication and relationship building!