As a final year student completing my last unit via industry placement, when I landed the internship with DPR&Co I wondered what to expect. How similar would it be to what I had experienced at university? How much of what I had learned about marketing would practically translate in a dynamic, real-world environment? Would I feel like I knew what I was doing or be completely out of my depth?
With these questions in mind, I walked in on my first day eager to meet the new team I would be working with for the next 10 weeks and excited about what I would learn and the experience I would gain. Yes, a little nervous too…
Stepping inside the cosy, but electric atmosphere of 21 Stewart St, Richmond, coffee in hand and first impression ready to go, nothing could have prepared me for what I experienced on that first day.
Marketing at university lays out the playbook, teaching you the rules, frameworks and textbook-perfect strategies for reaching audiences. Yet all that theory feels neat and tidy compared to the unpredictable, people-driven world waiting beyond the classroom.
Still only a few days into my time at DPR&Co, what has surprised me most about the real-world application of marketing is how much of the job at an agency is understanding people and nurturing client relationships. Behind the evocative and compelling ads produced by the team, the human factor is always in play. Real people with real ideas that they have turned into real businesses, coming as clients to DPR&Co for the promise of becoming bigger, better and going further with their advertising.
Inside the halls of DPR&Co, a narrow corridor where coffee, chatter, and concepts bounce through the air. Minds meet to wrestle with problems and reimagine possibilities.
These two parties engage in a beautiful, dynamic process, breaking through the walls of what’s been done before, and working together to uncover something New and True for each client. From there, they bring it to market as bold, resonant messaging that shapes distinctive, leading brands.
So far, I have mostly had the opportunity to see what this process looks like from the agency side, but I can’t wait for the times when I can sit in on client briefs and glean insight from a different perspective.
It might sound strange, of course there are real people doing these jobs, surely I didn’t need a business degree at university to tell me that! Customer centricity has always been the bottom line in marketing, knowing your audience and meeting their needs in comprehensive and innovative ways. This was not new. But the extent to which the human factor plays into the real-world marketing I have been thrown into at DPR&Co is something I did not expect.
On my first day one of the company directors said to me – about 10% of his job is being creative and coming up with new solutions, the other 90% is working with the real people he delivers for, getting to know and love them and digging to find the value that already exists in those people and those brands, that can be turned into diamonds through the refining of fire.
I am so excited to see what else I learn in my time here at DPR&Co, I’ll be back at the end of my 10 weeks to share how these insights have developed, changed and further informed my experience of what it is like to be a real-world marketer!
Written by Isabella Mellado – Monash University