Edward could not make this lecture so we watched a video recorded by last year’s students of his visit to ITB. Edward works for a company called ICAN as a project manager. ICAN specialise in advertising and communications, in other words they help clients make the right decisions online. Some services they provide are

  • Online Strategy
  • Web Design
  • Advertising campaigns
  • Search Marketing
  • Email Marketing Online
  • PR
  • Search Engine Optimisation
  • Project & Campaign Management
  • Multimedia design

ICAN have done serious amounts of work for some of the world’s best known companies and organisations, these include the likes of the World Rally Championship, Eircom and Sony. I found this very impressive. Especially for an Irish company to work with such big clients aside from Eircom.

Edward went on to explain how his company “converted people”. This came accross strange to me at first until he explained it properly. The exact meaning he gave was:

“A sale, a download, a visit, an open, a click, a new member, a cross-sell, an enquiry, a click, a booking, a forwarded email = it depends on the project objectives”

After this he gave us a brief insight into how campaigns are run and gave us examples of creative projects such as video game advertisment.Next, was how a project is run telling us useful information like what typical website project deliverables theree are and what the make up of a project team is, from the project manager to the actual creative team itself. But unfortunately there are challenges involved when doing any project such as “difficult clients”

Following this Edward spoke about his employer ICAN and the type of people a company like this would employ, I just had to decide which one of these I’d like to be. We were told how life working in an agency is, he even showed pictures of a typical work station of his coleagues

ICAN Employs:

1 Managing Director
7 Creative
7 Production
5 Client Services
3 Media
2 Search Marketing
1 Accounting

Finally we were given some words of wisdom for Edward

“Expose yourself to ideas.
Look to innovate and originate.
Or take a concept and make it yours”

This lecture was extremely relevant and useful, even if Edward wasn’t present. I really enjoyed it.



Advertisement