Department Zero Blog

Kicking off the summer touring season, we have had a lot of crews in our Kansas City office lately. Our touring staff spend the training week to learn about the brands and products they will be representing, meet the office staff and the client. They also eat an awful lot of KC BBQ. (Our office still smells like Arthur Bryants.) But training is much bigger than giving a crew a list of bullet points in the office. We role play, talk about best practices and share past experiences.

Our trainings also include a mock event. Our crews run through the entire process, from setting up the entire event site, consumer interactions, and tear down, to be sure there are no questions about the products, program or processes. Our Chrysler team, pictured here, gave test drives to our mock event attendees, and demonstrated the vehicles' attributes exactly as they would on the road. 

What do your tour training programs look like?

As you may have guessed, I am Erik, the 2012 Spring intern at Department Zero! I wanted to check in on the blog and report to the potential summer interns about what they can expect.

So far the experience has been great! From day one, I was assigned real projects, attended client brainstorm meetings, and learned how to run the front desk. I’ve even gotten to go out and view campaigns, take down displays, drive client’s display cars, and watch how the team formulates ideas for clients. Did I mention I have a killer office view of 20^th Street? Or, that we are always playing music?

I came into the internship just hoping to learn new skills and maybe some new ways of thinking. Thus far, this experience has taught me much more than any previous internship. It has taught me how an experiential marketing firm operates; gaining new clients, task managing, brainstorming concepts, etc.  I had never thought about how much detail goes into putting an experiential campaign together. Luckily, I am even creating one myself, as all interns make a mock marketing campaign, to present at the end of the internship. Can’t wait!

I know what you’re thinking; the answer is yellow and AJ took mescaline at work again.  While the latter may be true (it is Mescaline Monday after all), the former isn’t exactly right.  It depends on how you perceive it.  From space, the sun is white.  Here on earth we see it as yellow because we are looking at it through the atmosphere which sciences (or whatevers) the light so we see it as yellow.  White, yellow…yellow, white…both are correct, but since we are on earth, your answer is emphatically yellow.  This is just one example of how perception defines what we hold as universal truths. 

Here’s another one.  Empirically, your dog is no more loveable than your neighbor’s dog.  But since you know your dog’s personality, you like him way more than that other dog.  You perceive their dog as the lame dog that barks at 3:00am.  If you spent time with that dog, you would learn its personality and could come to like it much more. 

Like dogs, brands benefit from being seen favorably.  Perception determines how a brand is viewed and many things can color perception.  Most are out of a brand’s control.  This is why events can be such an important piece of brand building.  When you familiarize yourself with a consumer via conversation you humanize the brand.  You become less a logo and more an entity with thoughts, feeling and opinions.  The more personal the connection, the more likely you are to create a brand loyalist.  By spending time with a consumer you make sure you aren’t the brand that barks at 3:00am.   

Department Zero is on the hunt for the most creative, innovative, hard working and outgoing interns. If you live in Kansas City or Portland, OR, are a college junior or senior and feel passionately about marketing, you MUST read this.

You: 
Have many options to help you to prepare to for the "real world" and a long list of things that would be more fun to do thanshow up to an office for free. Your advisers and parents really want you to be ready to enter the job force, and you don't have to spend your first few years out of school referring to your parents as your "roommates."

We: 
Involve interns in every step of the process at our agency. Apply to learn how we create awesome brand experiences for some of the biggest brands out there. Gain experience building grassroots and experiential marketing programs for clients like Chrysler, TGIFridays, and Scion. 

How to score the best damn internship in the entire advertising and marketing universe: 
Send your resume to  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it  and let us know why you want to be part of our intern crew. Tell us about your personal experiences with brands at major events, what you believe grassroots marketing means to consumers, or if you happen to have crazy awesome skills we'd be crazy to overlook. Show us your personality and your passion, and we'll show you one heck of a time.

2012 Summer Deadline:

Summer (June 4 - August 17) Internship Submissions - 5pm, April 6th

If you know anything about me, you know that I *heart* infographics. This piece lays out the scary truth about where all our time goes in the modern day. It is no surprise that millions of us spend hours on Facebook, but it is interesting to see Pinterest's growth. Still considered a new property, Pinterest is almost half of the daily size of Twitter already.

"Bah Bah Blog Sheep" would have better matched the rhyme, but doesn’t make any sense.

Over the weekend I read John Dies at the End.  It’s by the same guy who wrote one of the best things I’ve ever read on the internet “What is the Monkeysphere”.  Anyhow, I came across this paragraph and I thought…Yeah buddy!  Easy blog post, here I come! 

“There was a sheep. In Scotland, I think. And this sheep escaped from the ranch. And you know they shear sheep for their wool. Well, this thing stayed gone for seven years. Finally they found it, in a cave. And there was nobody to shear the sheep and when they found it, its wool was gigantic. It was, like, a walking afro. And it wound up back on the ranch, just another sheep, but for the rest of its life it knew that for a while, it was free. It had that and nobody could take it away. Do you understand?”                     

Can I get a Kid ‘n Play high top fade please…

Raise your hand if you know where this is going.  Good job class, the point is that an experience can never be taken away because it lives in your memory forever.  For example, when I went to Disneyworld as a kid I talked to the Mickey Mouse.  I don’t remember what we talked about (probably mouse politics or why I should join his cult club or something), but I absolutely remember the experience of meeting him.

If you get your brand linked to a cool experience, it will live on forever.  It’s why Super Bowl ads that are watched, laughed at, and discussed by a group of friends at a party are so memorable, but the same ads when shown on Monday Night Football just don’t stick the same way. Lesson learned: Be a part of the event.  Class dismissed.

A Cheese Car gets attention. A Yahoo! story titled America's Most Outrageous Food Vehicles published on Friday featured the car along side other promotional vehicles like the Planter's Nutmobile Hershey Kissmobile. The custom promotional vehicle, a Chevy HHR with cheese, was created by Department Zero for the Midwest Dairy Farmers Association, alongside agency partner Sullivan Higdon & Sink and fabrication partner Display Studios.

Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. 

Valentine’s Day is right around the corner.  Many guys are stressing over what to get their significant others.  To get ideas, many will turn to the oracle Google.

You’ve got a killer program.  An awesome build-out.  Great staff to represent your brand.  Clear and cohesive messaging.   Now want to make it resonate just a little more when you take it on tour?  Time to think locally, while acting experientially.