Altair Media - Graduate Diaries

Ross

Initial thoughts on Altair Media

The level of interconnectivity between people. Everyone is always getting together to discuss, teach, and help each other, whether it’s for a similar client, or just talking about digital marketing in general. It is an incredibly open environment. In my case, it has been really exciting being able to sit down and talk with everyone in the office.

We’ve been having regular scheduled meetings with team leaders in order to understand what they do and how they fit into the larger organisation of the agency. Besides that, I have to say that I’ve been learning a lot about numerous topics, whether relating to social media, paid search, or data analytics.

How fast the company is growing and how fast it has already grown, in terms of the work we do and the calibre of our clientele. We have a lot of clients, many of which are global in their reach, and our team and network likewise stretch around the world.

How involved we are in the city and community. We pair up with many key businesses in London, especially in the entertainment sector. It’s exciting to be able to have clients and other partnering businesses just down the road from where we work, and have an ongoing relationship with them.

On Advertising

I’m definitely getting a better understanding of the many different levels of advertising, how they operate, and how they fit together, to the point of information overload at times!

Operational and organisational elements of the business that I have had a fresh introduction to which are central to the business are things like: media planning, tracking and reporting.

A few weeks ago I didn’t quite understand how Display ads worked, and how they might differ from a PPC approach. I understood how advertisers can segment and target you via cookies on browsers, but the amount of moving parts I’ve seen in Ad Ops seems wild.

I didn’t expect the amount of data that is involved in the day-to-day management of advertising campaigns and additionally how the business seems well-positioned to handle the industry as the industry itself changes and grows. It was interesting to see some parallels between my own school learning and what I saw Altair Media is working towards and considering for future projects. Some of these concepts were definitely way above my head at the time! Examples of this are things like machine learning and AI (both largely buzzwords as far as I was concerned previously), but also things like attribution modelling, and data analytics in general.

I definitely appreciate the opportunities that Altair Media can provide, both in terms of education as well as progression, and I now have a better idea of what is possible moving into a PPC role. I look forward to growing and contributing as much as possible, and I know I have the opportunity to do that here.

Jack

Initial thoughts on Altair Media

In terms of what I’ve found amazing working here so far, first and foremost it’s the people that spring to mind. Everyone has been incredibly welcoming and friendly, making sure that I’m getting on okay and understanding everything. Even down to just explaining what various acronyms stand for or seeing if I want to be included within meetings (e.g. the weekly account team meeting), it’s those little things that have definitely made me feel like part of the team. This week especially I’ve felt more integrated into the team, last week I don’t think it had sunk in and at times I felt like perhaps I was just on an internship but definitely in the past few days I’ve felt a lot more like a part of Altair Media and I imagine this will just keep growing as I learn more and interact more with everyone here and with clients.

There’s a couple of things that have surprised me and impressed me within this first week or two. Although I’d already gathered that Altair Media was an agency with a great working culture from the interview process, I didn’t realise just how open it would be within the office. For example, one day sitting next to someone on a similar-ish level to me (or the level I hope to get to with more experience and knowledge) and then the next day sitting next to someone from the more senior team has been brilliant and has really helped in these initial stages with learning the various processes within the agency. I think it’s also surprised me a little just how much there is to learn at the start. Obviously going into any new job (especially a first proper job) there was always going to be lots to try and pick up early on, but I didn’t expect to be doing things such as the Google Ads and Analytics courses within the first few days/weeks. However, these have already been a massive help and a great introduction to the marketing world and will only help further going forward.

On Advertising

The first thing that amazed/shocked me was just how specific targeting can be. From general knowledge and experience, I knew that targeting within adverts was obviously a very important thing, but just how much it can be refined and utilised to target extremely specific audiences has really amazed me. Looking at the Barbershop Chronicles campaign and the targeting within that, and specifically how effective it was, really opened up my eyes. It’s also made me notice adverts that appear to me online a lot more and made me question why they’re being displayed to me!

The data side of things that we’ve been introduced to has also really surprised and excited me in terms of just how much you can do with data within marketing. Coming out of a Uni course that involved quite a bit of data processing I’m really looking forward to starting to work with data again in the future once I’m more clued up on where to locate certain data or what specific trends to look for within the data etc.

Lastly, it’s been really exciting to see how Altair Media have such a large impact on their clients such as The Royal National Theatre. This is obviously a credit to all the people that work here and I’m really excited to now be a part of it and contribute more and more as I progress here.

About Altair Media

We are Altair Media and we are an independent media agency that is here to make our clients famous to the people that matter.

We believe…

Independent agencies are the lifeblood of the creative industries.

We are the antidote to the large agency networks, we will challenge you and we want you to challenge us. We are nimble and flexible to ensure we can keep up with your consumers or clients.

We believe in transparency; every decision we make will be in the best interests of your brand.

We believe that quality of work should never come second to income. Regardless of your scale, you deserve amazing work.

Altair is privileged to work on some of the world’s greatest brands and some of the most exciting start-ups out there.

You should never stop, never settle, always improve. Be amazing