Cooke and Co, Reed Winter Externship Program, Revant Bagaria
Through the Reed Winter Externship Program, Revant Bagaria spent a week with Cooke&Co, learning about the inner workings of the advertising and marketing industry.
This winter I worked with Cooke&Co, which is an advertising and marketing company based in New York City. This was the first time that I worked in a professional workplace environment and so this two week long externship was a very enriching experience for me.
The tasks that I was assigned were pretty basic, but they helped me gain an insight into the world of marketing and they also helped me hone my technical job skills.
I was required to do a competitive audit for Cooke&Co’s primary client, IMAX. Competitive audits are a thorough market research of a company. I researched on the kind of work IMAX did, its origins, its policies and its future goals. More importantly, a competitive audit of a firm refers to the thorough analysis of a firm’s competitors in the markets: their strengths, their weaknesses and their future prospects. I spent a considerable amount of time reading up about IMAX’s primary competitor, Dolby Cinemas.
Once I had laid the groundwork by finding all the required data, I worked with my team to prepare a short-term proposal for IMAX. IMAX wanted Cooke&Co to help them out with their marketing on the entirety of the East Coast. Considering that most of the big cities are on the East Coast, this was no menial task and so the proposal required a lot of planning. We were looking to determine the present brand value of IMAX and find ways of improving it. My team leader, Matt strongly believed that stories work better than facts and so we tried giving a story to the brand of IMAX. Some of our major considerations were: the size of the market, the threat posed by the competitors, and the budget allotted by IMAX.
Another task I was assigned was to read up about recent affairs in the advertisement industry and write short reports on any three interesting issues, daily. I ended up spending a lot of time on www.adweek.com because that’s where all the latest news of the marketing industry was.One of my most valuable experiences was when I worked with my boss, Steve on a project with TmaxSoft. TmaxSoft is a South Korea based Software Enterprising company with a stronghold in Asia. They are yet to make an impact on the market in the Western world and they want to begin with the United States of America.
I remember accompanying Steve in his conference call with the Sales Representative and Director of TmaxSoft. It was enriching to hear both Steve and the TmaxSoft officials introduce themselves, present their proposals and go about their negotiations. It was impressive how Steve spoke with confidence, ease and managed to be persuasive at the same time.
Tags: reed winter externship , advertising, marketing