This past week we’ve had a guest speaker and two agency visits. Our guest speaker on Monday was Dr. Gayle Kerr and she is a professor from Australia. She specializes in advertising where she teaches in Australia. Her presentation had a mixture of information in it. She spoke about several different advertisements that had me interested throughout the presentation. One in particular I related to most. The Game of Thrones YouTube clip was the most interesting in my eyes. She was unable to get the clip to work during the presentation, but I was able to find it online.

Here it is:

I found this clip genius and I wish the United States would come up with creative ideas like this for anything, not just a television show.

On Tuesday, we visited Bell-Pottinger Public Relations firm and David Wilson, the Group Managing Director, spoke to us for about an hour and a half. He covered a variety of topics, but the topic that stuck out most and was spoken about most was Rebekah Brooks. He worked for Brooks at the beginning of her crisis situation with the wiretapping scandal in 2011. He told us a bit about what they did for her and that he worked for her up until she was charged. According to Wilson, once she was charged she terminated his services. He appeared quite happy that Brooks was cleared of all charges, stating that even journalists had said there was only circumstantial evidence against her. He spoke of many other aspects of their business, but considering this was the most relevant information in present time, it especially stuck out.

Today, our group visited 360i London. This adventure was quite different than the rest of our visits. They spoke about the technical side of public relations, more than our other visits and speakers. They especially spoke about data mining and how their company utilizes it efficiently. A decent about of the presentation went over my head, considering they spoke on the more technical side and I specialize on the creative side of public relations. They talked about certain programs that were apparently very expensive programs to utilize. Overall, I think I learned a lot more from this visit than I did the others. They gave me a new view on how public relations works. I did not realize that there was so much technical work that went into it.

These visits this week have been rather exciting. I have greatly enjoyed meeting the public relations professionals and seeing their places of work. Getting to experience that alone has been wonderful. I  look forward to our visit with Wieden + Kennedy more because of the sheer amount of information I’ve been able to retain from these few visits.