Leo Burnett and Diageo are planning the second year of their joint internship scheme The Nest, which puts grads under pressure on both sides of the industry.
Without having experience of both client side and agency work, the next generation of advertising execs and marketers will struggle to deal with the demands the industry throws at them.
Leo Burnett Sydney is future-proofing against that by training up its junior staff in the arts of both sides of the coin. The agency is gearing up to launch the second year of its paid internship program The Nest following the successful appointment of two of the first-year grads into full-time roles at the agency.
The Nest, which the agency launched in partnership with Diageo last year, was an industry first in that offered four candidates a twelve-week placement split evenly between agency and client. It was a trial for the global ad network and it may roll out to other offices in the Leo Burnett group.
Peter Bosilkovski, Leo Burnett Sydney’s client services director, says it’s a failing of both agencies and marketing departments that juniors often reach the second or third year of their career without having any interaction with their client or agency-side counterpart and they have no idea how to handle it when it comes.
To ensure the future generation of marketers and agency execs are tooled up to deal with the demands business brings, the industry must ensure that junior marketers and suits have a perspective of both.
“The chief executive, sales directors and businesses are leaning more on the chief marketing officer to set strategy, benchmark the competition and shape the business – it’s no longer just about brand strategy and communications,” Bosilkovski said. “Marketers that don’t have that perceptive understanding or relationship with the agency partners don’t fully get the benefit.”
Interns’ talents are often underestimated by the industry and Bosilkovski believes if there were more programs like The Nest offering graduates real experience of what it’s like to work on both sides of the business, the industry would be in a better place.
“We invest a lot in bringing people up, but at that stage [interns] don’t really know what they want to do in the industry. We definitely underestimate people at that level and assume they have no commercial understanding but they are highly switched-on individuals – give them a hand and they’ll take your arm and just run with things.
“It should be renamed the Deep End because we threw them right in. We gave them real briefs to work on, projects to manage with P&L responsibility. It’s risky and takes a lot of trust. We had to be confident because it could fail and fuck up, but it elevates their level and places real value on what they contribute.
“Unlike other internships where you get some admin work, a bit of light project work, we gave them some meaty tasks and we were in the situation where one of the ‘Nesters’ on the client side of the internship was tasked with briefing the agency for a project. They then went on to lead the project from the agency side.”
Some of the work developed by the interns both client-side and agency-side is currently in production and due to launch later this year.
Leo Burnett Sydney has appointed two of the 'Nesters', Elizabeth Maunsell and Justin Hazelton to full time roles. All four of the candidates arrived with an agency-side role in mind for the future – by the end of the process one had decided client-side was the place to be and the other three were offered full-time roles at Leo Burnett. One chose to pursue a career in Melbourne.
In year two of The Nest, the shape of the program will be moulded by last year’s interns.
This article first appeared in the 21 February 2014 edition of AdNews, in print and on iPad. Click here to subscribe for more news, features and opinion.
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