Welcome to Anvil. Their special numbers are 250, 8, 5 and 2

If anyone, other than Anvil employees, can guess what those special numbers are congrats to you!

Today marked the first day of my last agency. Crazy how fast four weeks can go by.

My time at HMH was a blast and a great learning experience. Out of all of my three agencies HMH offered the most traditional agency experience. I was exposed to radio, TV, print and interactive. I was able to attend a press check, which was definitely an experience in itself. There were three major things I took away from that experience.

1.) HMH pays incredible attention to detail that definitely shows through in their award winning work.

2.) The printing industry has a large amount of waste "make ready". It was sad to see the stacks of hundreds of sheets of unused paper grow every time there was a slight color change in the ink. For the printer to register the change it had to make about a hundred copies. That means that all of the paper and ink was wasted. The printer will try and re-use the flip-side of the paper as scraps, but there is still an incredible amount of waste.

3.) When going on a press check always make sure to have a production manager and an art director present. The production manager goes by an image that was already approved. An art director has the advantage of working with that piece from beginning to end, so they know exactly what the color is supposed to look like.

Apart from the press check I spent majority of my time job shadowing Nathaniel Charlton an Assistant Account Executive. He told me the ins and outs of being an entry level AE. He had me working on a project to research social media avenues that would be appropriate for the internal Digital Evolution Team. At my last day, I gave a presentation to the office (including a person from their Charlotte Office) that described my findings. I'm not going to lie it was a little nerve wracking, but more exciting than anything else.

At Anvil, Hallie had me jump right in and take ownership of one of their projects. I am re-writing copy for search engine optimization. I don't have any experience in SEO or SEM, but I understand the context of its use. It will be exciting over these next two weeks to learn the practicalities and how to apply them. Because the point of SEO is to make certain keywords appear in the copy for a certain % of words, by the end of the day those keywords seemed unrecognizable as a word because I had stared at them all day.

It sounds like there are quite a bit of projects that will keep me busy at Anvil. I think they will all be very beneficial too because I will be learning the tactics of SEO and SEM from a group of professionals.