Half way through semester two of the second year of my
degree I was fortunate to receive an intern position with a well known boutique
consultancy within Perth called gtmedia, a firm who specialises in strategic
communications. Throughout my time with the firm I have discovered exactly
where I want to be after I graduate, I’ve made fantastic relationships with my
team and I have also learnt a lot about the industry.
Working within a consultancy can be difficult, as you are required
to produce work for many different types of clients. I have worked on projects
for a wide variety of clients from small charities to one of Western Australia’s
most popular apartment developers. I find the experience gained in a
consultancy exciting as most days I am doing something different for a
completely different client. Although what I have found over my time at
gtmedia, is that it can be difficult adapting my writing skills to suit the
specific tone of the client I am writing for.
Recently one of the senior advisors at the firm sat me down
with a few releases I had written over the past few weeks to discuss what I had
been doing well and some minor things that required improvement, such as the
way I changed my tone for different clients and she also suggested that the
quotes I include should be put in higher. I was a little surprised as I have
always received good marks for my media releases in class and had never
received this feedback, also because no one in the firm had mentioned this to
me before. This just went to show how your writing must be adapted for the
client and the firm you are in. I was very appreciative of this feedback, which
I took constructively, and put it to good use with the next media release I was
to write.
The next media release I was asked to write was for Brownes
Dairy, a long-standing client of gtmedia. It was the Thursday before and I was
asked to write a media release regarding ‘Freebie Friday’ the following day.
Brownes milk was about to relaunch their yoghurt range the following week and
to prepare for that they gave away 1000 tickets on social media to be taken to
the Brownes factory on ‘Freebie Friday’ to be exchanged for a cooler bag of the
new yoghurt range. I was given some information on the event and also given a
marketing research report providing background to the new range to write the
release. Once completed I emailed the release to one of my mentors who replied
back saying that it was the best release I had written for them and that it
would be perfect to send along with the pictures we were going to take at the
event. It was then sent to our target media for the story, which was local
community news outlets.
A few weeks later I was doing media monitoring for our
clients and I discovered the article they had been written from my release in
the Stirling Times. Although it was a short article on a very small event I
cannot deny that I wasn’t proud of myself for having an article written from
one of my media releases and published for the first time!
Thanks for reading, Jodie.
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