Final Month and So Much To Do..

Dear readers,

I’m entering in my third and final month at Apave and to speak true, I have not noticed time-passing by.

Those two last months have been so overloaded with work that time seemed to speed up and to speak true it was an amazing experience.

I’m not saying it was boring and that I was overloaded, au contraire, having so much work really gets into you and as an intern, you’re so proud when something goes right that you want this feeling to continue and get involved totally in your work.

1^st experience:

My major tasks as communication intern were mainly to contact the Press and keep in touch with them. What is interesting with this is that you really get the grasp of how it is to work with journalists when you actually work with them.

There is always that need to keep contact, to recall and specially to have regular phone calls with them. Whilst doing this, I realised that:

WOW

I was already beginning my first media contact lists and I understood that those relationships would or at least should last for the entire time that I’ll be in the public relations field.

It was quite interesting as an experience, keeping in touch with them is rather time-consuming but when you get the chance to have that sweet girl at the end of the phone who is really willing to help, you do not even think of it as time-consuming but as a well done task.

2^nd Experience:

When I began my studies, I thought that working in the public relations field would be mainly focused on the media relations but I came to realise during my internship that every single petite aspect that touched a company’s image and reputation was to be taken into account. From the designing of the invitation card to the articles and adverts posted in the Press.

Every tiny detail was to be considered crucial and budgeting really was a necessary pain to be considered at some point.

It all started when time had come to focus on all the conference day material. The Graphic Designer and I had to start working on all the official documents that were to be distributed to all participants, prior to the event and during the conference’s day.

Invitations were to be finalised and official documents of the conference day had to be confirmed before the end of September.

I thought that a month of work on this would be enough, but I soon realised that time went by too fast and that procedures took long.

We had to ask for quotations regarding the prices and the products proposed, we had to concentrate on a quality-pricing focus and we had a lot of amendments to do regarding the final documents.

Dozens of quotations later, I realised that to fulfil a task and especially when it was to be done budget-wise, you needed to make compromises and to choose the best out of a global quotation. One could order invitation cards with a company and the envelopes printing with another one. This was normal usage in a corporate world and companies had to deal with that.

Well I hoped that you enjoyed all of my posts and that it really helped you to get an insight of what my life was as an intern.

 

 

Advertisement + Editorial = ADVERTORIAL

As my supervisor and I were discussing a new sponsorship for the event, I stumbled across an interesting word - ADVERTORIAL.

In my majors as Public Relations and Marketing, we always use the word ‘advertisement’ and ‘editorial’, but not the two combined.

As we all know, Advertisement is a paid announcement to promote or sell a product or service, the advertiser has full control in the way that information is presented. 

Editorial is an article that reflects the opinion of the writer, it is often harder to control and may backfire for the product or the organization.

  

Advertorial is a combination of both terms – a paid advertisement written in editorial style and format, which promotes or presents a distinct positive opinion on a particular product/service. It is most commonly used in fashion magazines, however it is also present in other medias.

This raises some controversy in the office. Some of the consultants disagree with this type of advertising. They perceived it as a deceptive type of advertising.

In PR lectures we often learn about ‘ethics’  - is advertorial ethically correct? What do you think? Should we be allowed to use ‘advertorial’ or stick to the traditional terms of ‘advertisement’ and ‘editorial’?