Eco-Friendly Digital Marketing Internship

Pardon my absence.

I just returned home from Richmond, VA. Why was I there, you ask?

I was visiting the VCU Brandcenter, ranked in 2007 by BusinessWeek as one of the top 60 design programs in the world, and in 2008 by Creativity magazine as the #1 ad school internationally.

Not enough to impress you?

Have I showed you who sits on their advisory board? A who’s who of advertising legends, including Lee Clow, Jeff Goodby, Dan Wieden and others. These people and more make sure to keep the Brandcenter as challenging and rewarding as any ad school can get. David Droga, Creative Chairman of Droga5, sums it up nicely: “If I were a young student aspiring to break into advertising, I would go out of my way to become part of the VCU alumni. There are many good creative schools out there, but only one that cocoons this creativity in the necessary strategic and business sensibilities.”

My Dad and I sat in on the Presentation Skills class for 2nd year students. Each student gave a three minute speech, followed by constructive criticism from other classmates. One would think at such a prestigious ad school that all would be serious, but there was laughter and the overall mood was lighthearted and fun.

Marc Shillum, Director of Branded Design at R/GA, was the weekly Friday speaker. He explained how early consumer impressions, if not first impressions, including when a prospective customer lands on a Web site, are important for consumers when they are looking for more information about a brand or product.

What impressed me the most, apart from the program, was that the students were so incredibly helpful, friendly and obviously bright. One would think that they would secretly compete against each other, since they all desire to work in advertising. But all of them seemed to genuinely like their fellow classmates, and I think everyone wanted the person next to them to succeed.

Overall, I loved the school and how it challenges and pushes students to greater levels of creative thinking. The Brandcenter wants thinkers, not advertisers. Ideas are the currency of the future.

First off,  hi everyone my name is Jonathan Ciani and I am a new intern with Ingenex.

A recent article from USA Today discusses how the “informality of the Internet age”  is contributing to incivility in our modern society.  As many of you may know, there have been several “in-civil” acts that have made mass media as of late.  First off the Republican Republican Representative of South Carolina, Joe Wilson, blatantly called Obama a liar at his address to congress.  Then there  was the issue of Serena Williams physically threatening a line judge at the U.S. Open semifinal.  Lastly, we have Kanye West’s brutal interruption of Taylor Swift during her acceptance speech.  Kanye ran on stage just as Taylor Swift was making her acceptance speech and  interrupted her by saying that Beyonce should have won.

The USA today article explains that this recent incivility is thought by many to be due to the “informality of the Internet age” with which we live.  P.M. Forni, author of The Incivility Solution: What to Do When People Are Rude, told USA Today “American society is among the most informal in the world, and often that informality crosses over into incivility.  Now, you can add the informality of the Internet to this culture, and all bets are off.  It’s an age of total disclosure and total expression, with very little concern for the feelings of others.”  Jerry Bowles, co-founder of SocialMediaToday.com, also added “The ability to comment about others from a distance and with anonymity is the Web’s hallmark and its poison.”

I think most of us can agree with these claims, but as the article states, these issues individually would have been much less exposed by the media if they hadn’t all occurred within such a short period of time.  I think that this article brings up an interesting point, that we all need to realize when it is appropriate to use certain language, behavior and etiquette.  As for Kanye’s disruption, I’d like to think that his arrogance is definitely more to blame than “the Internet age”.  Kanye ended up apologizing to Swift in his blog admitting what he did was wrong.  However, he also included the cocky and childish statement in the blog “I’m just real.”  Shortly after this article Kanye also gave Taylor a personal apology over the phone.  Maybe he realized that he was losing a lot of credibility for his childish behavior.

What do you think?  Is the Internet age primarily to blame for incivilities in our society?  Or are individuals to blame for their lack of etiquette?

I would be remised to skip a formal introduction before I write my first blog as a social media intern at Ingenex Digital Marketing. My name is Brian Vandeputte and I am in my last semester at Michigan State University. I am majoring in advertising and hope to pursue a career in art direction.

Firefox and Safari are the two most prominent web browsers, however, they are obviously not programed and designed by the same company. Case in point, one of my first tasks at Ingenex was to re-design the LA2M Twitter page. I made the alterations on Firefox, and thought they would transfer over to Safari. Little did I know how wrong I would be.

Credit is due to Why Wait Webs, for helping me solve this dilemma. The gist of the problem is that in Safari, color in images mismatches with the CSS background colors. To rectify the situation, use an image instead of a CSS background color. Instead of having #FFF in the background color CSS code, you should have something like background-image:url(bg_solid_color.gif);

Then, if you make any changes in Photoshop, save your work for Web devices. In Firefox, you could save it as a JPG and upload it, but it doesn’t work that simply in Safari.