This week, we started going on a lot of company tours.
Monday, July 9 – We toured the Chelsea FC stadium and locker rooms. Chelsea FC is a popular professional football (soccer) club in London. It was a great experience sitting in the stands and seeing the open field, pretending like we were fans in an actual game. There was a very informative presentation about Chelsea FC’s marketing and sponsors such as Yokohama Tires.
Tuesday, July 10 – We had the wonderful opportunity to tour an amazing and independent creative agency called Mother. They were a very eccentric agency that could get away with crazy ads and campaigns. They change seats every 8 weeks to promote teamwork and adaptability as well as being dog-friendly which was very cute to see! They also have a wall with pictures of their employee’s mothers to go with the agency name. Their “Holy Trinity” philosophy is Do the best work we possibly can, Have fun, and Make a living. I really liked this agency as they were very fun and modern.
Wednesday, July 11 – We visited H+K (Hill+Knowlton Strategies) which focuses on different industry sectors such as mining and health. They have 3P Communications approach which are Performance + Purpose = Preference. In their Health & Wellbeing sector, they want to emphasize that they are focusing on people just not patients. We also had a presentation from a company called Signal that wants to make the unknown, known. They are targeting the problems of information overload and “siloed” knowledge. They want to automate simple tasks, pushing people up in the value chain. They want to make organizing and finding information easier.
Thursday, July 12 – We visited two agencies this day. The first agency was Mindshare, a media agency that wants to understand what you like/don’t like. They identified 5 trends – Get Snappy, Exploration Game, Access all Areas, Automatic for the People, and Destination Data. In the first trend, Get Snappy, there is an increase of image recognition, facial recognition, visual search, scanning codes, and products like Google Lens. The second trend, Exploration Game, focuses on discovery & inspiration through algorithms in social media as well as imagination and visualization such as Augmented Reality (AR). The third trend, Access all Areas, focuses on having connectivity everywhere, such as improved infrastructure with 5G and more public wifi as well as creation of new devices. The fourth trend, Automatic for the People, emphasizes automation in everyday life. There is the appeal of convenience but people don’t quite trust the technology yet and still want people and the human touch of personal connections and conversations. The fifth trend, Destination Data, is consciously thinking about privacy and personal data especially with new privacy renewals and regulations. It was really enlightening to hear about the research and discovery of these trends.
The second agency was JWT (J Walter Thompson). Their philosophy since 1864 is to make brands, not ads. They believe in curiosity, creativity, collaboration, and courage. The best part of this tour and presentation was being able to work on a live client brief for Nespresso, a brand of coffee. The brief wanted to raise awareness and get people to recycle the Nespresso coffee Keurig pods. We worked in small teams and although we had lots of ideas and butted heads at time, we came up with a campaign to showcase what those pods can be recycled into. My team did not win but it was so much to do as well as see everyone else’s ideas.
Friday, July 13 – My professor Carol recommended a really good Vietnamese restaurant called Little Viet Kitchen that she went to last year and we made reservations for today. A group of us went and I introduced some of them to Pho for the first time. It was different than how my family makes it but it was still good nonetheless. It was great time bonding with great food. I bought mochi ice cream for everyone so they could try it, which they really liked.
Saturday, July 14 – This was the day of the university-sponsored trip to either Stonehenge & the City of Bath or Dover Castle & the White Cliffs. I chose to go to Stonehenge and got some great pictures of the mysterious rocks. We also got to explore the Roman city of Bath where they literally had their hot springs and baths. They didn’t recommend getting anywhere near the dirty green water but it was cool to literally see where the Romans bathed. In the city itself, there was beautiful architecture mixed with modern stores such as H&M. There were so many restaurants and stores galore!
Sunday, July 15 – I really wanted to go out for dinner so I remember passing by this retro American style diner called Roadster California Burger in Kensington and decided to go there. Since I knew there was a cute vintage diner aesthetic to the restaurant, I turned it into a photoshoot with friends. I had gotten a Cajun chicken sandwich and Oreo milkshake. The food was good but a little pricey. The lighting was pretty bad as it made everyone look orange but I managed to get some decent pictures.
This week was very eventful with company tours and fun gatherings. One more week left! Stay tuned for more!
