My time so far at Muse has been full of exciting journeys into Mount Lawley (our coffee and lunch break stomping ground), Officeworks, Osbourne Park, West Perth, The State Theatre and Perth city cultural centre.. as well as our home-based office in Highgate where lots of screen shotting, gluing and sticking, email sending, media release and report writing takes place (as well as our fair share of youtubing, facebooking and friday afternoon Beyonce and Lady Gaga sing-a-longs).
This placement has been made that little bit extra enjoyable with the company of Olivia Russell and Lucy Stoelwinder who are also at Muse. Being fifth week in, the structure of our days is familiar and fairly routined as we know what needs doing and how to do things.
A typical day in the life of an intern at Muse Bureau consists of a coffee from The Merchant (first and foremost), then checking Google Alerts for any online publicity relating to any number of our current clients such as The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer, The Disappearances Project and Tender Napalm who are all part of Perth Theatre Company, one of our biggest clients. Other clients include Jandamarra, The Beaux Arts Ball, Henry and Aaron and our next big project, Perth Fashion Festival (PFF). When online media is sourced, we screen shot the article, save it to the necessary folder and record it in the Media Values Spreadsheet where we value and save the publicity. This is then compiled into a final report that is presented to the client which highlights all the publicity generated and how much money was ultimately made from this.
Any print media is cut out, stuck into the client's media clipping book and recorded into the spreadsheet. This process is repeated for all publicity including Radio and Television.
Although a little tedious, it definitely highlights how much work goes into the publicity of an event/client and how important it is to record EVERYTHING.
Previous shows of Perth Theatre Company's that we have collected media coverage for and finalised media clipping folders of include The Pride, Africa and The Ugly One (starring Gemma Ward). This was why our visit to Offiiceworks took place!
I drafted a media release for Jandamarra which was a little daunting because it was 'the real thing' and I was conscious of my boss reading it and hopefully not thinking it was terrible. I also recently wrote the final report for The Beaux Arts Ball which was a little difficult because I wasn't entirely sure what I was doing and I didn't actually attend the event but the template from the last report was fairly easy to follow so hopefully my boss won't have to change too much!
A difficulty I have encountered is my lack of knowledge about Excel. Both my work placements use it a lot and I really struggle with it. Olivia and I looked into doing a beginners course but the class was cancelled, so we will have to get onto that ASAP because it does create a bit of a barrier when finalising the spreadsheet. Valuing media is also something I'm not familiar with so that has been a little difficult but it is certainly a valuable and very necessary requirement in 'the real world', so learning it now is going to be very beneficial for the future.
The current show for Perth Theatre Company is entitled Tender Napalm and has already received a huge amount of publicity.. mostly good but also very controversial with the campaign image getting banned from billboards for being deemed "too suggestive".. but in this case, the saying "any publicity is good publicity" definitely rang true. Olivia and I assisted on the photo shoot for the campaign so we have had quite a significant involvement with this project from the beginning. We also spent a few hours last week handing out flyers to the event outside the Theatre and State Library and with the official opening night not until next week, we will have to wait and see what the reception is!
Our next big focus will be PFF. Although Muse are not doing the PR for the festival, they are producing six shows during the event so our involvement will be massive which I'm really excited about.
Will keep you posted on our adventures!
Soph
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