From…What Is Lowe Lintas? To OMG, It's Lowe Lintas!

Advertising agencies are very chilled out when it comes to the dress code and the office culture. We were allowed to wear anything and we called out everyone by their first names. I used to say ‘Sir’ a lot at the start, to anybody with whom I used to interact, but in a week or so I got used to calling out directly by the first name.

On the second day, I met my mentor again in the morning and he had a project planned for me. He had a project from Videocon d2h, which they were working on. So he assigned some tasks to me which Involved analysing DTH ads over the years and check what messages the ads were trying to convey. I completed my task within 2 to 3 days and reported to him. He suggested some changes and I was learning and absorbing. This went on for a week. I was learning how to analyse the ads and the tones, and messages conveyed by the ads. It was all thinking and trying to extract the communications out of the ads which were fun.

The second week of my internship was the best week of my Life. I got a mail from Rishabh who had assigned duties for me as well as others, from planning department for the coming 3 days. Co-incidentally there was going to be a Global planning committee(GPC)meet in Mumbai. GPC meet is done every year where Chief strategy officers of Lowe Lintas from all over the world meet and share their thoughts, culture, and trends. I was lucky that I got to be a part of the team that was going to accompany the CSO’s from all over the world, and got to interact with them. We went to receive our guests at Trident Hotel. I don’t know how lucky I was, but Mumbai Indians were staying at the same hotel and I got to see the whole team from a few feet away, and that was the best moment of my life. On day 3 there was a big party organized by planning department which was at Amadeus Lounge, NCPA Mumbai, where the variety of food and booze was endless. I was on cloud 9 that week and I thanked my mentors for this opportunity.

After the second week, it was all qualitative research and brand communications for the rest of the internship. I learned how to do competitor analysis while generating insights for a particular company TV commercial. I learned how to frame questions and perform depth interviews for research and how to extract relevant attributes from the same and apply it in further analysis. Apart from this, I learned how to study industry trends and connect them to our project. We had learned segmentation in Marketing lectures, but here I learned how to segment brands on the basis of brand personality and then decide what suits the brand. The essence and the strategic intent of the company should be in line with the concept that we are making and thus we move ahead. The major task here was thinking about specifics and trying to sharpen the attributes that are compatible and suitable for the brand. I did the same for top 4 competitors in the DTH industry, which was Tata Sky, Dish TV, Airtel digital TV and Videocon d2h. I used to sit for hours and think about words and ideas that would go with the thought process and the brand. I also learned how to prepare a good and interesting presentation, what the flow of a presentation should be like. Sometimes I used to feel like I don’t know anything or I don’t have the words for a specific thing, but my doubts were always cleared upon interacting with my mentors.

We had training sessions for all the interns at Lowe Lintas every week, where they trained us in Public relations, brand communications, the brand point of view, Competitor analysis, and many more insightful sessions. We got certificates for the sessions attended and for the tasks performed as an achievement. The best presenters were awarded by goodies. Even here they tested us for creative skills and application part. This used to happen at another office of Lowe Lintas in Lower Parel. We made some good friends with interns from different colleges and b-schools in Mumbai.

Thinking and creativity at Lowe Lintas lead me to start my own Instagram page. I wanted to be a food blogger. It’s interesting how the right environment helps you in going forward with the thing that you want to do. Being a foodie myself, I was going to start my page in the previous year, but CAT and other commitments at work didn’t allow me. During my internship, I was able to think about the idea and so, I finally took initiative to start it and started looking of a good name for the page, that’s where it begins, isn’t it. I looked for many words and synonyms and finally came up with” Exploeat” (Explore & Eat). I got it from “exploit” something related to exploring and eating. This name might sound simple and funny but trust me by the end of my internship, all my friends were using it as a replacement for “let’s head out to eat”. whenever we wanted to go out to, they used to be like ‘Ashish, “Lets Exploeat!!”’. It was always a pleasure to hear this from them. So I started posting about the best places in Mumbai where one can “Exploeat”. Fortunately, my page got some traction very early and now I have around 950 followers and increasing.

In the last week, I was asked to submit a detailed presentation of what I have recommended for Videocon D2H project. I had to edit my presentation 2 to 3 times before submitting the final one. There is a brainstorming session before giving the final ideas and presentation to the clients but since I was going to be there for 2 months, I was unable to be a part of it. My mentor commented on my presentation and said that my insights were helpful and interesting. We had a detailed discussion about the presentation, and he also took me through his presentations and explained how they make them at Lowe Lintas.

Last week was all about goodbyes to the new friends and the best workplace. It was an interesting two months of Internship at Lowe Lintas. It imparted creativity and thinking. All my friends were into Sales, Operations, Finance and other roles, but to me, advertising surely was amazing and different from all these roles. Overall it was a Creative Internship experience, at one of the best Advertising Creative agency in India.