Mindshare World

Work With the Business Planning/Intelligence Group At Mindshare World in London, England

As part of my study abroad experience at the University of Westminster in London, England, I applied to and was accepted for a program allowing students from American universities to have an internship while learning abroad. The process of actually getting the internship began in the summer of 2010 with several telephone interviews conducted after I had reviewed a list of possible placement companies. After a successful interview, I was placed at MindShare World.

Mindshare is one of the world's largest media agencies, with their headquarters in London. They are a part of the WPP family of marketing and advertising agencies, and they truly do operate on a global scale. Mindshare opened in 1997 with the goal of becoming the first globally-operating media agency, and the company today has 115 offices in 82 countries, employing over 6,000 marketing professionals. I was given the chance to be an "Insights Intern," an intern working on the Insights team in the business planning department.

The Insights team's role is to take a vast array of data, massage it into a relatively user-friendly or otherwise digestible form, and then take insights from that data that the company's clients can use to make sometimes even immediate changes. Mindshare has an impressive client roster, including several Fortune 500 companies. I was involved with work on the following accounts:
 CastrolFordFreeviewMazdaNestléTONI&GUYUnileverVolvo

The experience that I gained while with Mindshare was incredibly important for my future in the marketing community. As is my stated goal, I would like to eventually have a management-level position in marketing or advertising. The work that I have done here has given me many benefits which will further that goal. Chief among them is a much greater understanding of market research, both its importance and identifying what "good research" is. Before coming to Mindshare, I had had some level of experience with market research at varying stages in my education. In many of my classes at the University of Denver, I or my group was asked to find solid research data to support our positions. However, as a student, it is exceedingly difficult to find concise and accurate market data simply because data of that quality costs a good deal of money to access!

While with Mindshare, I have had the opportunity to reacquaint myself with industry-standard market research tools and have also been able to learn a great deal more about how these insights are derived. Working on the insights team has allowed me to access large amounts of relatively raw data and gain exposure to summarizing and learning from this information. This experience will make further work in marketing and advertising much easier for me. As marketers, we have to rely on market research to guide out activities, whether that relates to deciding what segment of a particular market to focus on or in figuring out what imagery evokes the greatest response from a particular demographic. Having personally had experience not only viewing but creating these sorts of insights is an invaluable tool that I will be able to use throughout my career.

Also an enormous benefit that I have taken from my time with Mindshare is the opportunity to once again work on client accounts. Having the chance to contribute to these large accounts has been a wonderful learning experience for me. Gaining even more experience in working in a large team environment and collaborating in order to put together useful and prescient reports for our clients is an experience that I had not had since my time with Carlson Marketing Worldwide in 2008. Being able to once again get the feel for the "real world" of marketing has allowed me to put a large portion of what I have learned in the classroom into practice in the same type of setting in which I will eventually work full time.