Thursday, June 20, 2013

Day 13: Meet & Greets and Meetings Galore!

Today was definitely the craziest day at Disney, while it is only day 4, I have a lot of prep work that needs to be done!

First, I decorated my office in a ton of Husker and Gopher stuff! I forgot to take pictures, but I will take some on Monday since I am not in the office until then. Let's just say that people will know where I am from and who I root for :)

Second, I had my first meeting of the day with the Florida Residents marketing team. Most of the meetings that I have been to focus primarily on the Domestic market segment, which essentially means all of the United States, besides Florida residents. Hearing their tactics and strategies to reach Floridians was really very interesting and a lot of their tactics are based off of consumer insights. As I am hoping to learn more about Consumer Insights in the future, this meeting was very interesting to me.

After the meeting, I had a meet & greet with Jessica who was the leader of the previous meeting and works primarily with promotions/special offers for Florida residents. She was really nice and helped me understand the segmentation of Florida residents, as well as the marketing tactics that are typically used. I learned that campaigns and promotional offers can range from simple to very complicated and integrated.

After Jessica I had to meet with Melissa, an angel sent from heaven, and she was helping me figure out the payroll situation that still has yet to be resolved. She has helped me so much with this situation and I don't think I could ever get it figured out without her. I will have to get her a little something for all of her help because she has honestly made all the difference in this situation. Unfortunately she will be going on vacation for two weeks until July 1st, so I hope that everything will be fixed by the time she gets back.

It was then almost 12:45 and I had yet to have lunch before I had a meeting at 1pm. I spoke quickly with Kim and she said that I could skip the meeting and have lunch, which was a complete relief for me. During my lunch break I tried to get payroll figured out more, but it was to no avail, so I just used my lunch break for surfing the internet and being on Facebook.

My next meeting was a weekly meeting with the entire Digital Marketing team and I got to see a lot of people face to face and even got to meet our Executive Vice President, Christie and she was really very nice. I'm sure that you're seeing a trend that everyone atDisney is very nice and really helpful. It is the best working atmospheres I have ever been in so far In the meeting we discussed the new process for which we successfully strategize, implement, and review campaigns. I'm SO glad that they went over this with everyone because it was helpful for me to be able to pull all the pieces of information I've learned over the next few days and apply them to this plan to understand it more.

After that meeting, I had to run up to the 5th floor again and meet with Randi who is the Associate Marketing Manger for EPCOT, Hollywood Studios, and Holidays. She was very helpful with outlining what she does and how I can most effectively support her in her role. She was really interested in using new technologies to promote Flower & Garden and Food & Wine for EPCOT, so I tried to reassure her that new technologies would hopefully be available by Spring 2014.

I had to leave Randi's meeting a bit early in order to be early to my next meet & greet, which was with the Senior Vice President of Digital Marketing, Scott. Kim met with me briefly before and she asked what questions I was going to ask and after I told her some of my ideas, she looked at me with  a blank stare and that was basically my cue to ask her if she had any recommendations. After I wrote down some of her questions, which were better than my original ones anyway, I made my way to the back of the floor to meet with Scott. Once Scott came out, I was still pretty nervous, but once we sat down, we talked pretty casually, had a few laughs, and I learned a lot! The best thing I learned is that he is truly passionate about Digital Marketing and he strives to share that passion with others. He is also a straight shooter, so he told me what he values in employees and what he does not like about employees. It was a bit overwhelming at first, but I could tell that he was telling me things for my benefit.

Finally, I had a meet & greet with Katie, who is the non-promotional messaging manager for the resorts. She first gave me some great hurricane preparedness advice, which was to keep some spare cash in case the ATMs do not work, to fill up on gas, and to essentially have a sever weather preparedness kit. After some of those Florida weather conversations, we moved on to talk about the different benefits that Disney resorts offer and how they differ from off-site hotels. As in all my meetings, it was very enlightening to hear how they market towards different segments and what tactics they use to be the most successful. She then started to talk about the Art of Animation resort where they have different themed rooms and how they were the new thing in WDW resorts. She asked if I had been in them, and I said that I had only seen them online, but expressed a lot of interest in seeing them in person. Her eyes lit up and mentioned that she was taking another Professional Intern on a tour of them next Friday and that I was more than welcome to come along! I can't even tell you how excited I was, so hopefully everything works out to the point where I can tag along to that one :)

Tomorrow I get to sleep in as I am not working, but I am planning on visiting the office as tomorrow we get free Monsters University Student ID's made! I will be "working" on Saturday by going to Magic Kingdom for the first time and completing a scavenger hunt that the Digital Marketing team has set up for me.

There should be a lot of updates and fun posts about the parks in the coming weeks as Staci and I are planning on visiting each of the four parks in four weekends. Magic Kingdom is over this weekend, EPCOT next Saturday & Sunday, and so on. I am SO excited to finally take full advantage of my cast member benefits, now only if I can could get paid ;)

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