During the summer of 2008 I interned at Young and Rubicam's head office in New York City. I worked mostly in the digital department doing copywriting and research.
Although, I did get a lot of exposure to other areas of the building, including the video and audio editing department. I got to work on real accounts, including Sears, Dannon, and Accenture. However, because of my extensive knowledge of hockey and everyone else's lack of hockey knowledge in my department, I was assigned primarily to the NHL account. This was perfect for me because I've been promoting hockey to a hockeyless country since I was six years old.

Intern Project

At the end of the internship all the interns were assigned one of two possible projects which we were to present to the other interns as well as to the heads of the company. One project was for promoting Y&R, and the other was for promoting the NHL, and creativity was essential. I was assigned to do the project for promoting Y&R, but I also was allowed to participate in the NHL group.

Y&R Project

For this project our group wanted to show people something creative, young, and cool. We wanted to people to stop thinking of Y&R as the old advertising dinosaur that is getting left behind in the new wave of technology. Me and two of my group members decided to make a viral website. We made the web site a metaphor for creativity and how it is infectious, and spreads throughout Y&R. Because of the criteria we decided to make the site about spreading awareness of a virus which we named the "YR Virus." We also made a youtube commercial with one of the freelance editors. We wanted to make the site and video very dramatic, but still have a large amount of hidden humor. So when the viewer finally realized what the site and video were really about they could go back through it and would find it funny.

Young and Rubicam