(Written by Daniela Battista)
A long summer awaited me after having finished my first year at university. With the constant pressure of career choices and creating the ultimate CV, I set myself a mission to find work experience. Having been interested in marketing and PR, I decided that I wanted to gain some experience within this field and was lucky enough to be offered two weeks’ work experience with Aspectus PR.
I was welcomed by the friendly and relaxed team on Monday morning, who were enthusiastic for me to get stuck into many different projects.
One of my daily responsibilities was compiling reports for one of their biggest clients. This is vital as it is one of the ways they create and maintain strong client relationships. As well as this, I also got the chance to look at some client presentations and proposals. Here I learnt about the components that make up a PR campaign. Much of the content is actually written in-house, which I never expected, and is used to help achieve the coverage targets set in the proposal.
I was also scouring forward features lists for possible coverage opportunities. This is where Aspectus gets a sneak peek of what is coming up in all the publications, enabling them to pitch clients to relevant journalists. I was shown the database and set about creating a list of journalists’ details with their feature synopsis for a specific client. It has been clear that Aspectus makes sure that anything they do for their clients is as relevant to their client’s industry as possible. Another example of this is by the personalised client press lists, which I helped to organise and update. It was interesting to see how Aspectus keeps connected with the world of publishers and editors, even if I wasn’t familiar with any of them.
Throughout my time I brushed up on my researching skills – something that involved time and some imagination. I researched awards clients can enter, twitter accounts to follow, analysts to contact and shows to attend in order to target new business clients; I never realised how important Google could be!
Many of the things shown to me were completely new and I started to develop a new vocabulary of PR terms. I am shocked by how much I have learnt here, with no textbook in sight. On the job experience has been one of the best ways to truly see what goes on, and I have gained a better perception of business to business PR. As well as this, experiencing what a 9 to 5 job was like, meant experiencing the dreaded early morning commutes – now I know why they call it the rat race.
After just two weeks, which seemed to fly by, I have enjoyed seeing a snapshot of the PR world. I would like to thank Aspectus PR and the team in London for offering me such a valuable experience.
