Trainees are still the workforce that keeps the big advertising companies running.

This inexhaustible resource (there are new interns every year), workable at will (if you don’t work, you won’t have your CDI), and often at the forefront of New Information and Communication Technologies (from outside the media, ask your digital intern for advice), is indeed the one on which we can make the most margin. 417 euros (30% of the minimum wage) often without additional benefits ( you have to understand, it’s not in our collective agreement, and our shareholders don’t like and it’s not us who decide, etc. ), a rotten computer lagging behind, 45 to 50 hours a week. It is difficult to find a better workforce except by bringing it in from China.

So I take advantage of my many discussions with interns (the aperitweet is useful for something) to talk about the digital intern . And, why not give some advice to these trainees, future, current and also former trainees who have now become recruiters.

Big advertising agency looking for intern expert digital curator and CM web expert

It’s not easy for a trainee to be caught in a big agency if he doesn’t know anyone there (because, little beetle, know that advertising is a networked world and we don’t easily get into it without recommendations). The alternative therefore remains the classifieds. So the intern without a network starts looking for advertisements.

In this case, it is better for the intern to know the Internet because the big advertising / marketing companies are all looking for digital interns. You can find lots of ads everywhere: community manager , social media manager ,  web marketing communication manager (don’t ask me what that means, I don’t know), webmarketing (in telemarketing, please), webmaster (yes it still exists) , e-commerce , web project manager , etc. (there are lots of funny ones here ).

It will therefore be quite easy for an already digitized intern to get caught in one of these boxes. It will suffice for him to show his twitter account of 200 followers (170 more than the one who recruits him), to say that he is an expert in social gaming (you know, the thing, facebook there), that besides the last campaign Volkswagen viral is awesome and that social media is the future of advertising. Community Manager ? Its second nature. Besides, the profession was invented for him …

Digital trainee, if you sell yourself at a discount, you will pay the price!

So we hire the intern, because in an agency we need young people who repeat what is written in Strategies and marketing blogs that generate traffic. His work will be mixed: on the one hand doing digital recos (he sold himself as an expert, didn’t he?), And on the other hand making the Community Manager of the brands, just to make a little profit on his back .

What ? Does this cynicism surprise you? Hey, you are not business leaders! You don’t know that an intern is ultimately very expensive for a company. Yes, it even costs exactly 417 euros including charges (yes, it’s exempt, the state is nice). Well, if we add the electricity he consumes, the bandwidth, the computer we loaned him, and the toilet paper used for 6 months, it must be around 500 euros / month. It is well worth the 3000 to 5000 euros HT from Community Manager that we invoice the customer every month, right?

And then if you asked him to play his poker internship , he shouldn’t be surprised to be plucked either, no but …

Community manager rhymes with intern

So the trainee bac + 5 will do social media for 6 months, refine his knowledge of the brands he manages, the communities with which he interacts. He will rise (quickly) in skill. He will digitize himself, and try to digitize those he approaches. He’ll learn publicity, well if we let him attend a meeting. But the atmosphere is more than nice (otherwise there would be more than financiers in the ad) and the permanent feeling of creating great projects is a perfect motivation.

But the internship is already ending, and the difficult question of the next step looms … In the most serious boxes, the intern will be pre

came a month before. For others, it will be the week (or the day before) before we leave. And there, we make him understand that this moment spent together was very nice, but that it is over. If so, obviously he did his job well. Yes, yes, he was very nice, a wonderful companion even. But hey … This is not the price at which we sell the community manager who will succeed in paying his CDI (by counting the 50% minimum gross margin that the agency makes on it). So it’s time to go our separate ways …

And here is our ex-trainee who resumes his road pitifully. He will try to find a job or maybe a new internship on new bases. This time he will try not to spend 6 months acting as a community manager…

The digital intern is the key to agency renewal

We could pity him, and yet it is the agency that we must pity. Because the digital trainee is the one who breathes new life into traditional advertising agencies by bringing them new ideas.