First full day in Milan. We had a very full day today with two media visits, Burson-Marsteller & Rie. We had our first taste of Milan transport as we all crammed on busses to get to our first destination. Only a few made it on the first bus. The nice thing is, I was able to lead the second group by using City Mapper and the direction from Serena.
The first visit, Burson-Marsteller, was an ad/pr firm. Since it is not my particular field, I was not super excited for this one. However, they really are doing some great things and I found it far more interesting than I expected.
They mostly focused their presentations on their campaign and imaging for a drink called Campari. Their work was quite elaborate! It included short films and ads featuring 12 bartenders from around the world that each had their own Campari cocktail and story.
For a drink that was NOT that tasty (they gave us some at 11am!), it was very high end! All of the videos were so well produced. I was really impressed. They even gave us some sandwiches before we hit the road!
Second visit of the day was Rie, the Italian media company. We took us a bus and a trolley car to get their. The trolley car was really fun. I get like I should be hearing the Mr. Roger’s theme playing in the background.
As I said, Rie is a media company and is technically independent and not government funded. They are one of the two primary media companies in Italy. The other being Mediaset, owned by former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi… absolutely no conflict of interest there (eye-roll!).
We started with an overview of what they own, their channels of television, radio and internet. I find it interesting that they charge by tacking on a fee to people’s cable bills! Serena our new (Italian) guide had some thoughts on that. It boils down to a private company being forced to collect money for the government, a policy she said is against their constitution. It also seems interesting to me that the Rie board of directors has members nominated by the Italian parliament (eyebrow raise!).
In any event, their facilities are beautiful. One of or students, Emily, was interviewed live over the air of one of their show. They spoke in Italian and then interviewed her in English, then translated it back to Italian for their audience. It was really fun to watch. They seemed like they were a popular show and the hosts were fun. It was fun occasionally hearing them say Point Park or WPPJamongst the fast stream of Italian.
Rie has three separate TV studios. There’s a small virtual studio (blue not green like ours), a news studio and then their third (elaborate) studio that had studio audience space. All three have packed control rooms as well.
Their virtual set features a really cool device attached to the camera that tracks the movement of the talent. It allows them to adjust the virtual set as they record. Very cool!
The news set features both a national and international news desk. Even though I have seen my share of studios, I am still always impressed with how much they can cram in such a small space yet NOT make it seem crowded on camera.
The studio folks played us some content (on set screens) filmed in the third space and turned on the different light grid presets. The material they showed was reminiscent of something similar to the [your country] has talent the show.
The clip was definitely a bit odd. When the lead singer stopped singing (and the band played on), there was a voice track featuring speeches/spoken word from someone (no idea who!) as video of the person payed all over the background screens. The lead singer started running around holding the mic up to the images of the man on the screen…. more than a little odd!! Hahaha!
We had a free evening for dinner. Darlene and myself and two of our slightly older students found a tiny little local place for dinner. The food was good and we had a nice time. More importantly, we managed to avoid the thunderstorm raging outside. It was a good day!