If I ever wanted to work abroad, I suppose I could work with Arkage (Art Attack). They were one of two media visits that we had today.
Their presentation focused mostly on digital and consumer experience marketing, which are both aspects in advertising that I’m interested in. The most exciting part of the presentation were the case studies. It was amazing to hear what they could do with such a small team and a lot of passionate employees.
My favorite campaign that was presented was the colorful Fiat project. The fact that it was localized and involved working with the specific neighborhood in the UK was a really cool concept. Despite hearing that the whole project was difficult to execute logistically, I really appreciated the creative thought behind it. The color concepts, treats, and special events are all elements of advertising that I want to work in.
The following media visit was with La Repubblica. Their presentation focused on their most popular pieces, which were soft news and online video reports.
They also revealed their partnership with another company that provides data mining and website services.
Once we finally got back to the hotel, we were all exhausted. It was a really early start in the morning and we’d been moving nonstop. Our room decided to take a break and nap. After about an hour of resting, the time was now 9PM. The purest form of willpower is what convinced me to get out of bed and attempt to venture out in order to find dinner.
Kayla and I decided to have dinner with our hostel roommates, Ally and Sydney. We ended up eating at Rolli 1. It was a very small restaurant close to Osteria Maruzzella (the restaurant we ate at on our second night in Rome) that was still open and willing to seat us that late in the evening. Using very basic Italian and Spanish skills, holding up four fingers to signal that there were four of us in our dinner party, we finally got to sit down. The waitress brought us the giant chalkboard with the menu written on it but it was still too hard to understand. Thankfully the woman seated at the table next to ours spoke English and noticed how much we were struggling. She recommended four traditional Roman pasta dishes. Struggling through pronouncing those words as well, we somehow managed to ask for a bottle of white wine to split between the four of us.
Dinner was a learning experience, but it was good. The pasta dish I got was similar to that first pasta dish we ate on the first night sans the allergic reaction. We asked the waitress to split the check and to our surprise she actually allowed it. This was a big deal because it was explained to us before this trip that culturally checks aren’t split. We were really strapped for cash collectively so using our debit and/or credit cards were the best ways to pay.
Shout out to that woman who really helped us out and to the waitress for dealing with us even though we were all struggling through the ordering process. It just further proves that being bilingual (trilingual, quadlingual??) is such a valuable skill. What would we do without multilingual people??