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We were asked to produce a piece of art for in the head office of Virgin Voyages, this is a sister company of Virgin and it specializes itself in producing a sustainable cruise ship that will collect ocean plastic during its journey. Sean came up with a design for a typographic piece with the tagline of the company, this would be made with ocean plastics collected throughout several beach cleanups. So for the first beach cleanup with collaborated with Debris Free Oceans to gather their volunteers to come to a beach in Hollywood, Florida to do a couple of hours of beach cleanup. We collected a decent amount of plastics but not yet enough to produce the whole piece. This is still ongoing when I left the company.

I knew due to my earlier encounter with Sean back in September 2017, that a lot of the Citi Bike promo post and photos are shot in-house. They have a professional DSLR camera that they use for a lot of work. Because I was mainly in charge of Citi Bike I was sent out a lot with the camera to shoot for various activations. Sean gave me a run down of how to use the camera and how to edit pictures afterward. One of the first activations that I shot was the one for Miami Open, those photos were eventually used for posts on social media. Those photos can be seen here.It was pretty hard at first, I had to come up with the whole idea of the shoot, pre-shoot to look for good angles, shoot on the right time of day with no people and good lighting and eventually also edit the photos. For someone who has never shot with a professional camera and has never done product shooting, it was a new but very interesting experience. The second time I had to shoot was during our Ultra music festival activations, this time it was a whole different setup. The activation was in the middle of a walking crowd and I had to capture actions instead of a still item. It really gave new situations: I couldn’t pre-shoot we were right in the action, how to and focus on the action but still capture the esthetic of the scene. It was also during mid-day so the lighting was another thing I had to work with, so I had to experiment with the right exposure and ISO but that had to be done really quick otherwise I would miss out on the action. I was also new in the world of editing photos using Lightroom like mentioned earlier Sean did give me a quick rundown but every photo is different so it was really up to me to let the photo look great. At first, a made some huge mistakes and made some photos look even worse by overdoing some things, but after editing 100+ I can say I have a fair understanding of the basics of Lightroom.
This goal was really something I was keen to learn for a while and this was the perfect opportunity to do so.

This was maybe one of my most important thing to improve when I got my first class on Photoshop 2 years ago I was amazed by everything. I already gained some basics when designing my website and some other projects but to really create artwork, I wasn’t ready for that yet. Luckily Sean is a pro in Adobe applications especially Indesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator. He gave me a lot of directions and guided me well throughout the whole process of designing, for me it was really a trial and error process of sending my final product to Sean and he would be sending feedback back for me to adjust. Sometimes I worked on something for half a day and eventually, Sean made it from scratch how he wanted it in 30 minutes, those moments where frustrating but those are also learning moments and gave me more urge to perfect my next project. At one point I was in charge to design all of the Citi Bike social media posts, it was really a task where I would get a guideline and the rest was up to me. With the Citi Bike Ciclovia post, I even got the feedback from Sean that my work was maybe even better than what some of the art students put out, this gave me, of course, a lot of confidence.
I think in the end I really improved my skills in Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign and eventually Lightroom.

it’s a common problem among people my age, they are not confident enough to have a good phone conversation with. The same goes for me, in Dutch I’m even not that confident to just call someone or the take a call, I always plan what I’m going to say when I see the phone ringing. So for me, who isn’t even confident enough to answer a phone in his mother language, it was a real step to take for me to be managing the office phone in English. When I first started my co-worker wrote down a simple script to follow when answering the phone, but he would still answer most of the incoming calls. But when he left around March I was assigned on my own, what first was kind of scary. There were some awkward situations, even one time the caller wanted to know my name and function because he wanted to complain, which is never filled. One of the thing that I was really struggling with was to say “no” or to let the caller wait, especially Michelle taught me just to do it and just say no on moments it was needed.
At the end of my internship, I really felt comfortable with both answering calls and to call people even when it’s not my first language

Besides from amazing photoshoots and perfect graphic design, SMC is capable of throwing the best events in the Miami area. This is also one of the reasons I wanted to do my internship at SMC. In my past, I already helped with various events ranging from music festivals with supporting with a press launch in the Shard in London, but SMC has such a broad client portfolio that this was the real opportunity to experience different kinds of events.

SMC is many of the times responsible for everything involved with the event, think of location scouting, crew hiring, decoration, experimental elements, time schedules, promotion, budgets, etc. This gave me the opportunity to really look into all of these elements and really get an understanding of how things work and how they sometimes need to be arranged in a very small time window. Some of the events I worked on from scratch to implementations were: the AHEAD Awards and Bad Bunny. On both of these events, i also helped during the event, as support of Michelle or Sean or to support the staff.

The competence communication translates to tasks as coming up with social media posts captions, reply on comments on social media, writing plans. I continuously worked on this competence, I had to talk and write in English all the time for 5 months straight. I’ve set up a goal at the beginning of the internship to improve my EKR level, I was on C1 with speaking and even though I can’t do an official test, based on the reactions I got over the course of the internship I think I can conclude that my speaking has definitely  increased, someone in NYC, for example, said that he thought I was from the south of the states because of my accent.  My writing level when last recorded was B2, I think that my English vocabulary and my understanding of grammatical is improved well. I really got to experience the usage of your tone of voice, I’ve sent dozens of emails to clients where those emails had to meet high standards, but on the other hand, I was also in charge of many of the caption on Instagram and other social media posts. The later gave me the opportunity to experiment with also sarcasm and metaphors.  

I also made a tangible product in the form of a communication plan for Citi Bike Miami, this can be found below.

Marketing Communication was a key subject within the company, it was implemented everywhere. I think is best expressed in the work I’ve done for Citi Bike Miami: Social Media posts, coming up with new ways to target new customers, writing plans for new activations and making recaps for past activations. Coming up with new targets especially for Instagram really had me coming up with new ways to let CB define themselves as a strong established brand. Some of the work where this directly can be seen are the Mothersday promo , Ciclovia promo . Besides from the promo post I designed, I really wanted to give CB a strong meaning what the brand doesn’t have right now. When I first saw the brand I saw it from a “tourist” perspective and for me, as a tourist, there are many ways to commute to Miami. Because CB is main income is made by tourist, it has to be a standout brand for tourist to choose their way of commute over Uber or public transport. That’s is why I wanted to let CB be THE tourist guide of Miami, a way to travel from A to B and catch a glimpse of everything that’s happening throughout Miami. The tactic was to promote parks, musea, tourist attractions but also local events that are only known by habitats. We did this by using every possible way we could: Facebook, Facebook ads, Instagram, Instagram stories, etc.
The next thing was to get offline and online on one line, they had to be consistent. One of the main things that were lacking was that whenever we hired brand ambassadors they were randomly picked, but we didn’t have the time to fully educate them on the brand Citi Bike. That is why i proposed to get designated brand ambassadors that are well known with the brand but are also relevant, they had to represent your everyday user to be more in touch with the audience.

The product of this competence was supposed to be the AR Wywnood tour, but like you can read in my own reflection at the bottom of the page, this project was canceled midway. But since I can show I physical product I looked into the study guide for the full definition of the competence, it says: “manage a project, business section, business processes or a business”. So I looked at the list of performance indicators and I will run down each bullet point to see if I indeed “completed” the competence

• Handling a simple conflict situation
in a project group.
When I began the internship there was another employee, it was basically Michelle’s assistant but he would manage many of the events. So I basically always worked together with him on many of projects like the gay pride activations, Snowbirds & Flamingoes. Especially during the gay pride activation we had a couple of arguments, he didn’t sign up for the parade in time and he was gone on a vacation for a couple of days. With a few days left I had to arrange everything and come up with another activation.

• Dealing with unexpected events,
that disrupt processes in the project group
and respond adequately with help from
third parties.
In the case of the Earth Day event, the co-worker had without a notice called of the farmers market because my initial idea of a sort of digital photo booth that would let you see the change done by car smog en co2, wasn’t going to fit. I then had to contact the hotel where the farmers market was held, to arrange with them that we still could be part of their market. I also had to quickly act with Citi Bike to reserve bikes because we double booked the date and said yes to both the farmers market in the hotel as the bbq at the bar

• Providing leadership in a result-oriented way,
under supervision or supervision, to one
simple business unit or project.
Especially when the other co-worker left the company, I was managing the whole Citi Bike account by myself. I was doing the Instagram post, replying to comments, coming up with ideas for the Instagram stories, shoot the stories, managing the customer service, coming up with new activations and promo, having contact with CB to arrange things and ask for permission for various promo’s or ideas.

• Formulating long-term goals and these
establish in consultation within the project group
and timely testing interim for feasibility.
There were barely possibilities to set up long-term goals because almost everything we did was product based, but there was one client this was possible and this was Citi Bike Miami. And if you look at the Instagram rebranding and switch in how we wanted ourselves to be seen, this definitely had some long-term goals to achieve. Think of goals for engagement levels or follower count.

• Estimate by value of the contribution of
an employee or member of project group and
give feedback to the project group.

• Collaboration (multidisciplinary) in one
professional environment to more complex task
with limited guidance.
Within in the company, which is seen as a professional environment, I worked most of the time on sometimes very complex tasks like, setting up a budget or having contact with the clients without any guidance from Sean or Michelle

• Plans together with others of the
work logically, structured and
achievable after a given goal, deadline
and quality level.
SMC is a deadline based company because we work with many clients at ones a lot of products have strict deadlines. Some of the work I’ve made had a turn over time of 1 day from scratch to finished product. That kind of projects need to let you have your work together and work efficiently and structured, otherwise, you are going to break under pressure

• Steering and regulating your own
development in terms of learning,
result-oriented work, initiative and
independent action, flexibility;
I think that with my personal goals I’ve set up and that I all hit, I showed that I can be consisted and take action to get things done. Also with the failed AR Mural tour project, I was never not motivated to proceed and make it work, the only reason I canceled was that of (cost)efficiency

I wanted to create buzz around Citi Bike on a continuous base, so I came up with an idea for a promotion. You can read the proposal I wrote below.
Promo Idea July

When we wanted to execute the idea we encountered a couple of vital problems, this is can all be led to the lack of having a good website and app.

Venus Swim fashion came to SMC and asked us to come up with an experienced event to launch their new line for 2018. The wanted to target a younger audience because they are now mostly known by people ranging in age of 35 to 50. So we had to come up with a good concept to get that younger audience, I immediately thought about social media influencer. Social media, in general, is used intensively by the younger generation. This really tied in with the competence marketing communication as I had to come up with a way to target a new audience by changing the way of how the brand is memorized. It was harder then I in first expected it to be, mainly because it’s not my field of knowledge and I don’t know what women want in their swimwear, so to really move into the shoes of a possible customer and see the brand through their eyes was maybe the hardest task. I did know what was visually good to combine and I let this also know in the proposal.
The event itself is in August so I won’t help with anything regarding the event, I did get feedback on my proposal which was pretty positive

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This project didn’t really contribute to any of the competencies, rather it gave me insight into how things also can go completely wrong. It was an activation that was set up almost 2 years ago by RedBull, it was off the radar for a year but around March 2018 it got picked up again. The idea was to give away a power bank and a Bluetooth speaker to college kids. RedBull first asked Supermarket Creative to come up with the design for the packaging, the wanted a box for the Bluetooth speaker and an elementary folding toy (see pictures). They initially wanted SMC to come up with a couple design and then they would think about choosing them to design it or choose another company. SMC didn’t agree and eventually they designed it themselves, afterward, they asked us to print the design on thin cardboard for the boxes and paper for the folding toy they also asked if we could order portable chargers and Bluetooth speakers with their logo on it. But the print work didn’t have folding lines and the design was a blue graphics background with references to RedBull Radio but a lot of text. My first reaction was, this is not going to work for college kids like myself, they are going to see the power bank and the speaker, tear everything else off and throw it away. This was the first problem, they didn’t do proper market research. The second problem had to do with the design, they didn’t count in folding lines so when everything was folded into a box some of the text was unreadable.
So because it was an activation that had been sitting for a long time and also changed in representative over at RedBull, the whole project came out more expensive and with lower quality.

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  Folding toy, folded open

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  Folding toy, folded closed

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  Bluetooth speaker with packaging

Click on the image to see more

Click on the image to see more

Supermarket creative got approached by Sleeper Magazine who hosts the international AHEAD awards, and they asked us to come up with a proposal for their Americas edition in Miami. The theme of the night was tango and our task was to do the production of the event. We started with a site visit to see the venue and measure everything to order supplies, the venue was the billion dollar Faena Forum. We were in charge of podiums, decorations, all the incoming orders like the actual awards, book entertainment, work with the AV company. My part in this was really administrative, I was supporting the incoming order management, creating and editing rundown schedules and keeping the client up to date about the progress. On the day of the event, I helped out with arranging the decoration and supporting the staff making sure everything goes like we planned it to be. I was also asked to help during the event making sure we were running on schedule. During the setup there were some problems with the run of the show, the client didn’t let us know there was an updated run of show. This was solved quickly. Everything went amazing on a few details like music not starting in on time and the presenter forgetting his mic when he walked up, but with both of those I could help and none of the guests noticed

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  The Awards

For our client CitiBike we try to anticipate on local an national events that are happening, gay pride is quite big in Miami Beach, and therefore the perfect opportunity to reach a big audience. The first idea was to participate in in the parade, this has been done in previous years but due to difficulties, this wasn’t possible. Instead, we came up to wrap the stations and bikes in the rainbow flag, eventually, we choose to only apply custom decals on a selection of bikes. The decals were basically the rainbow flag with on the basket the sentence: “Ride with Pride”.

My task, in the beginning, was the design for the decals, this was something I had never done before and I needed the help from Sean. I experienced that it’s hard to design something that isn’t flat and needs to be wrapped on to something.  The biggest tasks I got in this activation was shooting the promo photos. When the bikes got released I went to the stations to would be dropped off on Ocean Drive, my coworker and I shot the photos and with his help, we were able to arrange a transvestite from a nearby gay bar to pose for our promo photos. Besides shooting the photos, I also had to do the editing, because I already worked with Lightroom with the Ultra activation I knew what to do and how to do it effectively

This was really one of the promos where I could work on my competence “marketing communication” To celebrate mothers day, CB launched a promo campaign. We wanted to give out promo codes that had the value of o free 1-day-pass, but because we didn’t want to just put it out on social media for everyone to share. I came up with a sign-up form and put a link of that page in our Instagram bio together with a promo post also leading to the link. People could leave their name and email in the form and they got a promo code back in their email. I also had to design the emails that were sent out you can see an example below.

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  Emailer to the contestants

The photo on the mailer, this one was also used on the social media post, was shot outside the office the day before mothers day. Together with Sean, we managed to almost perfectly cut out the bike with the real flowers in the baster and make it into a nice looking post, the result can be seen below.

My part

Based on the design made last year we gave a twist by adding different colors and moderarising it, this is done at the story image and the second Instagram post. I created the first Instagram post image that is been shown belown. With the help of Sean we figured out the best way to arrange the text and which fonts to use

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This event was very similar to the event we did for Apple Music, SMC was responsible for the venue scouting, arranging decoration, arranging staff, coming up with an experience element, I wasn’t really involved in the whole process of this event but I did support Michelle with the styling proposals and helped Sean with collection various decoration items from storage. Other than that I mainly was in contact with the representative of Spotify to make sure all the shared files were up-to-date and correct. I helped Michelle with managing the offline binder that contained all of the important files and made sure calls to suppliers were made on time and things were signed on time. I think having so much contact with a client really improve my competence “communication”.
On the day of the event, I was in the office while the rest of team was over at the venue setting everything up, I mainly managed all the other stuff in the office and made sure that whenever the team needed forms or other supplies from the office I get those to them on time. I, unfortunately, couldn’t make it to the actual event.

Miami Beach organized a ciclovía, they shut down Washington Avenue for cars. This was held on May 6th and lasted from 9 am to 2 pm. To participate with CB for this event we came up with discount codes, people could sign up and they then would receive their unique promo code.
I got the task to create a visual that is going to be used for the social platforms, the goal was to create a visually pleasing image that is still telling all the info. It was a hard task because most of the time the promo posts are not doing well, the reason for this is that with this kind of posts text has the most prominent place in the post. The actual call to action is to use the promo code in real life, so it’s hard to create an image that not only captures the attention of the audience but also be in there mind long enough for them to remember if they see a Citi Bike Station to also really put in the code. It was a small promo but still a lot of fun, during the actual Ciclovia event I also went out to shoot some Instagram stories of the action that went down on the street

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  Revision 1

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  Final Design

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  Front of the recap deck

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Miami open was held on March 19 and to highlight tennis in the Miami-Dade area we created a photo campaign for the Instagram account of Citi Bike Miami. In this campaign, we highlighted all the public tennis courts in our service area.

I was asked to search for an event that was happening in the upcoming month which we can tie in with. So I saw the Miami Open was being held in one and a half month, so I began coming up with some ideas. I wanted to highlight the public tennis courts in Miami, and get people to get in the mood for the MO. I’ve searched for all of these tennis courts by cycling around town and looking for pricing, then I put them all on a map that was supposed to go somewhere on the Instagram page. To support this we wanted a good photo shoot that was relevant for this activations, and I got the task to shoot those. I first went to look for inspiration by looking at some iconic tennis(style) photos and adds, after I had collected enough material to create my mood board. After that, I went looking for a good tennis court that I could use to shoot on. This was one of the harder tasks as it’s pretty hard to find a free tennis court that isn’t reserved. But when I found one I first got some test shots because I had to make it look interesting even though the object I’m capturing is not that excited on their own. The day after I went back to take the final shots with the right lighting, a shot my photos and went back to the office to edit them.

This was maybe one of the simplest activations that I did during my internship. Last year during Ultra they Citi Bike did the same activations. So we basically copied last years budget, idea, but we did make a couple small changes in the plan. So production and planning wise there wasn’t really anything that had to be done. But it was the perfect opportunity for me to work on one of my personal goals “learning how to photograph”. I sent out to shoot the action with our in-house camera, it was the second time I did a shoot but other than the previous shoot I did everything was now moving. This gave me a lot of difficulties with how to set my focus, it was also around 3 pm so the sun was also high up and very sharp, this all contributed into it being a very hard task.

Supermarket Creative got approach by Apple Music to do the production of one of there Up Next events for Latin hip-hop artist Bad Bunny. Our task was to scout a location, arrange decoration, make sure bars are set up, arranging all permits, finding a way of entertainment besides the performance, arrange to staff, arrange security, arrange photographers, etc. The project had a quick turn around and not a lot of time to plan, we had scouted the venue “1306”, SMC worked with them before so we knew what to expect. We then went to scout all the items we needed, for the venue itself as the green room where the artist was going to be sitting. We did this to go through what SMC already had in storage, and ordering items from Amazon as well as renting various furniture pieces.
The day before the event I was at the venue with the people from Apple Music to make sure everything that had to be delivered was delivered and that everything was without any damage. On the day of the event, I helped the team to set everything up and making sure everything went smooth and looked good. One of the frustrated tasks was to apply big strips of adhesive paper to a 3-meter high wall. During the actual event, I helped out the security guards to make sure people weren’t getting pushed to death in the busy crowd. It was a really nice event to do especially because I really experienced it being just an idea to implementing those ideas and making it reality.

Citi Bike Miami / Supermarket Creative got the opportunity to give away tickets for various events that were held during MWM. Last year Citi Bike also gave away tickets by doing a spin to win the contest. I wanted to give a twist to last years concept with combining offline and online by printing out posters and spread them over Citi Bike stations, people had to take a picture of a designated area of the poster and post it on their Instagram with a hashtag to get 1 entry, you could post the picture as many times as you wanted each counting for 1 entry. My goals were to have Instagram full of the picture on the poster, creating a lot of buzz around the brand and activations. In the end, they thought it was too complicated with too many steps for the audience to take. So, in the end, we went the traditional way they also did last year. People had to take or a photo of a Citi Bike station, which would count for 1 entry, or the person on a Citi Bike which would count for 2 entries. I was also in charge of sending the winners their tickets and thanking them for participating

Both Sean as Michelle are members of the SOHO house, this is an international hotel chain that is focused on the creative industries, guests are ranging from influencers to artist to fashion designers, etc. SOHO house Miami gives the company that is connected with the hotel the freedom to set up and creates parties, this month it was SMC’s turn to deliver something. It was being held during Gay pride in Miami beach so the theme also fitted the activations that were going on. Sean and Michelle arranged all the setup and I basically helped with the execution.

When we had to come up with ideas for an Earth Day promotion is proposed a couple of ideas. One of them was producing cotton custom tote bags with the designs from our custom Citi Bike map and distribute them over various Citi Bikes around the city to encourage the use of reusable bags instead of dozens of plastic bags. So because it was earth day and it’s all about going green and sustainability I decided to highlight the environmental benefits of using Citi Bike over any other way of commuting. This idea didn’t go through due to the small time window we had. To highlight this the idea was to put up a green screen with a Citi Bike in the foreground, people could take place on the bike and after the photo was taken we would add a split background; any side is with clean air and a happy city, the other side being full of emission gasses and smog and it had the line which future do you want to live in the center of the image. This couldn’t be done due to the limited space we had available at the market. Eventually, we were going to be standing on a farmers market with a booth to promote Citi Bike, the idea I came up with was to deliver Citi Bike as a way of commute that is way better than any other. To back this up I designed a custom infographic and printed those to give out on the market. Besides only giving information and infographic away we also wanted to have some interaction that’s why we came up with a raffle promo to win a free 1-year-membership. We would also provide a shuttle service to the Broken Shaker, a bar nearby, to join a sustainable BBQ, we had a station outside the hotel where the farmer market was held so we reserved some bikes to be delivered to the station to run the shuttle service.
The event itself wasn’t well visited, this was mainly due to the wheater, it was pouring all day. In total, we had 15 entries on the raffle contest, and the shuttle service had to be canceled due to the low amount of visitors.
A week after the event, strategically planned to remind them about the brand, I designed and sent out a custom email to all of the entries, in the email, that can be seen below, we offered them all a free 1-day-pass as thank for entering the contest, the winner, of course, received one with a free 1-year-membership code.

Constentor email

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  Info booth

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  Front Infographic

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  Back infographic