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Week Eight: 6-13 Nov

It’s week eight of the Brunswick internship programme. The team takes you through what happened, day by day…

This is the eight blog entry from the 2009 Brunswick Six, click here to return to the blog index

Friday 6th November (Jenard)

Our Friday afternoon session at the Brunswick offices started differently today. We had the pleasure of being given a guided tour around the Lincoln Centre.

This is a ‘business presentation and client entertainment centre’ that was purpose-built to fit the needs of Brunswick’s clients. It was an impressive set up, and showed us how clever and innovative the management at Brunswick are, to recognise the need for companies to have a venue like that, and in a central London location.

After the tour we had a session with Melissa Keys, who kindly gave us an overview of a typical week for her as an executive at Brunswick. She went through the different tasks she performs and explained how each job was important to Brunswick’s clients.

Next we had a very engaging session with David Yelland, the former editor of The Sun, who discussed his fascinating career history, and gave us an insight into the media and the role PR plays in it.

The last session was with Roberta Whitter, who gave us an introduction to investor relations. We were told what happens on ‘results announcement’ days, and how Brunswick and their clients prepare for investor announcements and communications.

Friday afternoon sessions at Brunswick are always very, very good, and today definitely didn’t disappoint!

Monday 9th November (Charlotte)

Everyone gets to work a little earlier on a Monday. Each week we rotate computers, and it’s usually on a first come first serve basis. There are six of us, and four iMacs and two Macbooks. Generally those last in find themselves on a laptop.

I often wonder if the make up of the computers (ie four desktops, two laptops) was done intentionally to test us, because every Monday someone’s not happy with the computer arrangement and we have to sort it out between us as a group.

Today, Tina made the grave mistake of arriving mid-morning, a big no no on desk distribution day! Things got very quiet as Tina walked through the office towards the only computer left – a laptop. But it wasn’t really her turn to forego a desktop.

I caught Param peering over her computer screen, and Claude got up to make a coffee to go with his coffee. We knew the boys would stand by their first come first serve policy, so it was down to me and Param to work this out. To be fair, I had only been on that laptop twice, so I put myself forward, reluctantly!

At 10am the Interns gathered in the meeting room at Unicorn House to receive an overseas call from Jackie Shorey – who we’d met recently – and who is currently residing in Singapore. With three of us going off to the Observer editorial conference on Wednesday (and the other three the following week), Jackie kindly offered to talk us through everything there is to know about the paper, so we were fully prepared. It was good to hear from her again, and she was keen to know what we had all been up to since her last visit.

This afternoon we had a session with Chris on broadcast media. Before today our sessions were mostly geared towards print media so it was a nice change and yet again another great session.

Tuesday 10th November (Junior)

Tuesday morning started off quiet, which was unusual. In fact it was a bit like a library at Unicorn House, because everyone was busy with their Friday presentations.

All three groups took turns going into the meeting room for top secret discussions. The funny thing is we aren’t really competing against each other this week, but for some reason we don’t share trade secrets. It’s probably for the best, although I often tend to ‘accidentally’ eavesdrop.

Tuesday afternoon was different however, because we talked about the the internet and social media. Being that I have a background in ICT from my college days I was at the edge of my seat throughout. We talked about online media and its importance, as well as the impact of the net on traditional media, and the emergence of blogging.

The cost effectiveness of media was also discussed, and we looked at the benefits online media had over traditional print – more space, cheaper distribution costs, and the facility to update content immediately.

Chris talked about the challenges and opportunities the internet presented to companies and their PR teams. Among other things, he talked about how some web companies allow their executives to talk openly on their company blogs. This was both an opportunity and a threat. Consumers find it easier to relate to a real person – but it means companies putting trust in their executives.

Interesting discussions followed. Though, just when I thought we were all getting along again, everybody went back to their presentation groups to continue with their secret planning.

I cannot wait for Friday!

Wednesday 11th November (Claude)

The morning started with a session at Taylor Bennett, which centred around networking. The majority of the Interns have some experience of networking – and the importance of it, both in PR, and for our own careers, has been discussed previously on this internship – but I don’t think any of us realised that there was actually a set technique, in fact almost a science, for people who want to successfully network.

This session was lead by Heather McGregor, whose innate ability to network has almost reached legendary status! Certainly a lot of people we’ve encountered on the internship have told us how good at networking she is.

Heather explained the importance of ‘personal capital’ – knowing the skills and experience, and personality traits, that we each offer – our personal USPs I suppose. She also explained the importance of knowing people from different social groups or networks, as opposed to having lots of contacts in just one. This means you have access to a diverse range of people with a plethora of skills.

Our session at TB ended with an exercise in which we had to split into pairs and learn some new facts about our partner and feed this information back to the rest of the group. This showed us how to acquire important information, and how to then relay it to someone else, thus creating a link between two new people, and expanding our own networks.

The afternoon session saw myself, Jenard and Charlotte visit the offices of The Observer. This was a trip that I had really been anticipating, as The Observer is my Sunday paper of choice, and I’m an avid Guardian reader.

We met Comment Editor Ruaridh Nicholl, who spoke to us about the paper and then took us on a tour of the their offices. The tour was very interesting – with particular interest being paid to the bullet holes in the window of the Guardian office!

We then had a conversation with Ruaridh, which allowed us to voice our opinions on current affairs and politics. It was interesting to see the way we were able to have and express informed opinions about what was happening in the world, and the shift in the way we all view what the newspapers tell us, which is as a direct result of this internship.

Then came the coup de grace, the Observer political conference, which we had been invited to sit in on. It was a surreal experience, as we sat in on a roundtable discussion of what the news was going to be, and what would appear in the next edition of the paper. All the paper’s political writers were there, including Andre Rawnsley. This was an amazing experience, and we were very aware that people rarely get the opportunity to sit in on meetings like this.

Overall this was another great day, both the Taylor Bennett session and The Observer outing were amazing, and I’m very thankful that we were able to experience them.

Thursday 12th November (Tina)

This morning we had some time to work on our weekly presentations. I was partnered with Junior, which was exciting because I hadn’t worked with him before. We worked on the design for our slides and got really creative.

This week we were given a financial institution and its CEO to research. We got Barclays Plc so I decided to e-mail the CEO, Jon Varley, directly. I was utterly taken aback when he actually e-mailed me back and answered my question!

In the afternoon we all had a session on press releases with Chris. He had printed out about six press releases he had received – each from different sectors and communicating different things, giving us the chance to get a feel for press releases in general.

He then gave us three news articles all covering the same story and based on the same press release, which he had a copy of. We had to guess what the press release might have looked like from the way journalists had reported on it. That was a fun exercise as it was quite challenging.

Friday 13th November (Param)

This morning was a great start to the day. We had to deliver our presentations of the week to no less than three people from Brunswick – Jo Moss, Roberta and Bertie.

Our task this week was to brief Heather on the chief executives of Barclays, RBS and Lloyds. Everyone was slightly apprehensive about presenting to Jo, because we’d not met her before, but knew that as Head Of Recruitment at Brunswick she was someone we should try to impress! But the good news is, the presentations went well and everyone seemed extremely impressed.

Next, Sarah gave us each a copy of our internal references. Every one of our fellow interns had written about what we were like to work with, and the role we play in the team. We had one-to-one sessions with Sarah to discuss the references and how we feel about how others see us. It was an eye opening session that enabled us to assess ourselves in a new light.