Author: Jamar Callender (Page 1 of 3)

During my time here at Eventive has been an eventful experience. The staff here has a great sense of humor. You’ll always hear someone laughing or cracking a joke, but when it comes to mentorship or looking for one it’s not so easy. The reason why I say this is because everyone is in their own heads thinking whether or not the client was satisfied or not so initially mentoring someone is not in their best of interest right now.

Luckily you might find someone who is willing to sacrifice their time to help coach you  to become knowledgeable of the mentee’s surroundings, and I was lucky enough to have my supervisior whom which is the creative director to take the time out of his busy work schedule to speak to me for 30 mins every Wednesday to see how I’m doing, sharing his work to get an idea of how to better conceptualize  something while trying to pick my brain on what I want to improve on and achieve during this internship. I absolutely appreciate him for being supportive and understanding of me making the transition once I’ve graduated.

He has taught me to control my nervous actions when presenting in front of everyone. There are times when I  do find the confidence to speak to an audience, and not freeze up and there are times when I just completely shut down and go completely blank. I’m going to get that under control, but you never get rid of your nervousness because it’s what makes your presentation  energetic and genuine.

So far during these past three weeks, I’ve learned that yes, I am capable of doing great work, but my speed and agility to come up with something in a small turn around time is minimal. Meaning I’m not as fast, but I’ll get the work done well. My main problem is not liking to show something unfinished instead of the finished product. Even though I’m proud of the work I produced my speed needs to catch up as well. One specific project that is a prime example of this situation was taking on the task of producing a design for the agencies screen saver for there mantra ( Communication, Collaboration, innovation and representation) I brainstorm out a comp through sketches  and went with the direction of hand lettering the words out, sadly it didn’t work out as intended. I finally came up with a solution to make an animation, but that again didn’t work out because the agency couldn’t  use a 3rd party app on there server to make a video screen saver so I had to degrade my work into stills so it can transition to the next page. This project that could’ve taken me two days but it  took me four days.  It was not what I intended it to be. The work came out beautifully as it’s simple and easy to read. I know that in due time my stamina will increase as each project is given to me to grow and challenge myself.

The culture at Eventive Marketing is youthful and easy going with its staff. One thing that I do enjoy is that there’s happy hour every other Friday to celebrate a successful week. My agency dress code is dressy casual, not really the usual button-down shirt with a tie and a suit, But I enjoy wearing a simple professional outfit which includes a button-down shirt with black pants and shiny slip-on shoes. The typical workspace area for employees working there is a semi-open desk workspace in the main area of the floor just for account services and the marketing team. This is also where all the interns sit to do work at a tempory little round table since we’re moving on the 22nd of June. The creative and strategy team have their own rooms with individual desk space. While accommodating our shared floor with three other agencies the work days does get a little hectic around Wednesday-Friday afternoon. Meetings are very frequent around these times as well, as workers become rigorous our minds need to refuel on food for lunch which most of the floor goes out for lunch and eat outside on the sky lounge to destress and get some fresh air while enjoying their lunch before getting back to work. lastly, the hours are from 9am-6pm, but the day doesn’t start until 9:30 am.

The role I’ve taken for the rest of my internship is creative and with that responsibility, I would help the creative team with there workload from client designs. When there’s a new client pitch I composite a deck with already giving context from account and strategy teams so all I would have to do design mood boards to potentially inspire clients to want more from us. The title that supervisor currently has is the creative director’s position. With that being said how did I came to obtain this internship is through the AD Club of NY which is an organization for students to broaden their network base with recruiting agencies Which I luckily did with Eventive Marketing which was my second choice besides Rauxa.

During the interview process it was only through phone, once I found out I was apart of the 2018 summer AD Club interns my portfolio and CV was sent out from the coordinating Ericka Riggs whom I grew a business relationship for almost two years and was forwarded to the various agency members recruiting talent.  What was amazing was the callbacks for interviews from Elephant, Bullish, Rauxa, and Eventive that I schedule for a phone interview with one person HR  two or one days apart with a maximum time of 45 minutes on the phone. Eventive Marketing gladly took a chance with me then giving me the confirmation a week later. The question that was asked was  “what made me go into the field of advertising?” “Who Inspired  you?” “Why Art direction?” and lastly, ” what are you looking for in an agency?”