Finally back to making a post of my internship experience! Gosh it’s been almost three months now that I’ve been working at this office. Things are now clicking a lot more than they used to at the beginning. The amount of experience I’ve been getting in the world of digital advertising is amazing. But there is still so much to learn. I think I’m getting a pretty solid high level understanding of how our systems and processes work. To add to the mix, we have been integrating systems from Yahoo and AOL for the past month. AOL’s systems will still take some more time getting used to but I hope to have a high level understanding of their side before I leave next month as well! 

I just recently finished my internship project with three other interns at Oath. This project was a deep dive for an advertiser of Oath, Gold’s Gym. The goal of this project was to research Gold’s Gym and figure out ways to get this client to spend more money with our company by increasing the amount of advertising spend they currently have with us. This project allowed me to talk to so many departments within the digital advertising sector of Oath and build my knowledge base as well as networking with other employees. I even learned how to use multiple insight and advertising platforms to gather the information we needed for our deep dive project. 

Along with this project, the last few weeks have been filled with integration meetings after integration meetings with the AOL department that aligns with our ACT team. Even though they can be tedious at times, it’s very important to understand where AOL is coming from and what systems they use in relation to our own. The last few weeks have also been stacked with fun Oath events to make us feel welcome into the new company. I haven’t been hearing any complaints about these awesome events! :) 

Now that the intern project is complete, my time is more open again. I am getting looped in with more cases and campaigns from my mentors. With a better understanding of what my Advertising Creative Technology (ACT) department does, learning the steps for these cases makes a lot more sense and I can retain more of the information I’m learning. 

With 3 months in, that means I technically only have 1 more month left. I want to make sure I get the most out of the last month that I can. I need to continue learning from my mentors and researching areas of our company that I still need to understand. 

A few weeks ago I was out in downtown Omaha celebrating pride weekend. When I was getting ready to go home that night, my phone died before I was able to get picked up by my Uber ride. With no way to contact anyone, I had to walk home that night. I live 15 minutes from downtown so it took me about 2 and a half hours to get home. I told my manager what happened to me the following week and she went ahead and gave me a portable phone charger (Yahoo Women In Tech branded and all!!) so that I wouldn’t have to worry about my phone battery dying on me again. 

These past few days have been very interesting to be an intern for Yahoo! I guess shouldn’t say I’m an intern for Yahoo anymore. We have officially merged with AOL to create the company I now work for called, Oath: A Verizon Company. With this transition a few people in our Omaha office were laid off in order for us to successfully merge with AOL. It’s been pretty emotional for the full time employees but they all know that this is a part of the corporate world and are looking forward to seeing the future of Oath prosper into the ever changing digital world. 

Lately I have been getting more opportunities to get to know the other interns here at Oath/Yahoo. They are all very cool people. I’m excited for future outings with them and making long lasting friendships and business connections.

This week wrapped up very quickly with the whole transitioning of the company so I focused more on some of the training documents assigned to me and further diving deeper into the realm of digital advertising. It’s a never ending pool of information. But it keeps things fun and interesting. When working with new technology and online services you never know what new discoveries are around the corner. And when these new discoveries are found or innovations are created, we get to work with them! 

These weeks working at Yahoo are flying by. I couldn’t be more grateful for all the help my mentors have given me in understanding what the Ad Creative Technology team does for Yahoo and how we partner and get amazing ads put up for our advertisers! 

During week three I was present at multiple meetings with my mentors and even got to see the first steps of a project developing. There’s a lot that goes into kicking off a new project with an advertiser so it’s nice to see the start and fully understand the process :)

From my first week here to now I can already tell that I am comprehending so much more when I listen in on meetings. Even though my training can be tedious at times, going through documents and documents of new terms, programs and processes, I feel very satisfied when I am in a meeting or syncing up with the ACT team and can understand what is going on or even contribute to the conversations. For me, it’s been all about connecting the dots with terms/programs I’ve heard and how they function and fit into what we do at Yahoo. 

Last week we had a little field trip to Cunningham Lake in Omaha for a cleanup project. Growing up on a farm my whole life I’m used to being outside and working with my hands so it was really nice to get out there and do some more physical work! And it was for a good cause! Who doesn’t love that? This is another reason why I like working at Yahoo! The company cares for the environment, especially in the communities where Yahoo companies reside. 

To end this blog for week three, I must mention that this will be the last post in which I will be solely working for Yahoo. By next week we will be combined with AOL to form the new company called Oath: which will be owned by Verizon. Things are definitely changing around the office but I see a lot of hope, excitement and opportunities for the future of Yahoo within Oath:

We shall see! 

Just learned what a 70:20:10 Structure in a business means!

70% Experience 

20% Exposure (learning from others/mentors)