We’re looking for a Digital Producer to join our team. You will bring your solid agency track record managing web projects & their clients, building creative and innovative ideas and managing resources and external resource suppliers. You bring the zen to any situation and take great pride in how organized your budgets and schedules are. You run a tight meeting. Clients love you. Working closely with the partners, the client and internal teams, you will help develop strategic (mostly digital) marketing solutions with depth and substance to meet our clients’ strategic and tactical marketing objectives.
Responsibilities:
Prepare project documentation: proposals, project plans, Statement of Work (SOWs), status reports
Completion of project plans that result in satisfied clients and project teams, and ensure the delivery of projects on time and on budget.
Work closely with the partners to ensure stellar delivery and strategic growth of the account
Participate in the preparation of pitch materials.
Participate in strategic planning and conceptual ideation sessions, and business processes with client.
Identify risks and develop appropriate mitigation plans
Manage and deliver projects on budget, on time, and on schedule.
Document, learn and support all aspects of project: scope, risk, schedule, budget, quality, and communication
Working closely with partners (and frequently directly with clients), communicate with clients and teams on an ongoing basis and ensure changing resource and project requirements are met and understood
For some streams of business, own client relationship
Manage all project related requests with the client
Participate in client pitches and proposals by helping to prepare pitch documents, project budgets and related materials.
Gather and interpret project requirements in order to deploy resources in the most efficient and cost effective manner
Work with partners (where applicable) and clients to understand project milestones, and timelines in order to manage resources for various projects simultaneously throughout each project’s lifecycle
Arbitrate resource or task conflicts and create systems to minimize conflicts
Work Hard, Be Nice, Think Big, Love Digital, Have fun
Other tasks as needed
Required Skills and Experience:
3+ years of direct online or advertising agency digital project management/producer experience.
Ability to guide and direct production teams to keep them on budget and schedule while continually inspiring them to innovate for our clients.
Ability to identify risks, analyze options to mitigate risks, and raise concerns to senior management appropriately
Solid understanding of web production processes.
Ability to work with a diverse range of talents, personalities and teams.
Ability to work under pressure, within extremely tight deadlines and maintain a good sense of humor, tact and professionalism.
Have analytical and financial skills in order to forecast and report revenue, expenses, and project completion milestones.
Knowledge of standard project management tools and methodologies
Knowledge and experience working in an agency model.
Knows how to motivate, challenge and drive a team to strive for creative excellence while balancing the budget and timeline
Skilled in facilitating brainstorming sessions, feedback and review sessions, and client meetings
Ability to analyze a process and help drive improvements that are needed
Expertise in managing multiple projects effectively
Strong ability to negotiate budgets and timelines with clients
Looks for new business opportunities with the clients
Ability to successfully manage the change request process
Ability to balance client needs and project needs
Strong writing and communication skills
Knowledge and experience working in traditional and web mediums.
Knowledge of design an asset.
Attributes:
Must have good sense of humor, professionalism and personable attitude
Excellent communicator.
A consistent leader who voices their ideas while respecting others.
A good eye for detail.
Enjoys a fast paced environment.
Facilitation, team motivation and team leadership skills.
Able to focus when under pressure.
If you’re the Producer for us, please drop us a line at jobs@poundandgrain.com and include a copy of your CV.
Super happy to have created the new NoodleBox website. This is just the first phase, but we created the responsive design, complete with burning/smoking typography, along with everything you need to find locations and delicious menu items. Congrats to the team over at NoodleBox on your new digital face.
Wow, it’s mid-March already? How did that happen? Since late last year, we’ve been heads down working pretty hard on the launch of our new friend whil. A exciting new concept from Chip and Shannon Wilson, whil is a new brand about dealing with our increasingly tech-stressed digital lifestyles. Not only did we create the responsive website design, shoot and edit a bunch of brand videos, we also activated the brand at SXSW. Stay tuned for our full case study and more exciting whil news to come!
It’s quite hard to avoid suffering from FOMO at SXSW. Over the course of a few days there are literally hundreds of sessions, and almost as many parties and events. Over the last few years, I’ve gotten better at realizing that its impossible to see it all, so now I don’t even try.
While I may have only gone to a handful of sessions, parties and events, and can by no means claim to have had a comprehensive overview of the festival, I won’t let this stop me putting together some thoughts and musings on this year’s SXSW Interactive.
Ever since Twitter “broke” at SXSW in 2007, and foursquare to a lesser degree in 2008, many people all try to guess who or what will emerge as the next big app of the festival. Because of this, seemingly every single website, app, or tech related service now launches at the festival, or has a major presence, and as a result there doesn’t tend to be any clear break away app or product.
Its much easier to identify certain trends, and from my perspective, here are a few:
1) Brands have finally showed up!
In the past, the interactive festival has been attended primarily by developers, start-ups, venture capitalists, and agencies. And to my mind, this was finally the year that brands attended the festival in force. There seemed to be a lot more brand managers, marketers and communications professionals in attendance. Good for them, this stuff is too important not to learn first hand.
2) Data overload and the disappearing interface
There were a lot of conversations this year about data overload. As more and more data (be it valuable or not so valuable data) continues to come at us on our multitudes of devices, we need to find ways to digest this information in increasingly intuitive and efficient ways. Ways that don’t distract from our real world experience, but instead augment it.
At least two companies brought this to the forefront at this year’s festival. Leap Motion demonstrated their gesture-based technology that enables users to get at and manipulate data and content in new and (ostensibly) more powerful ways. While it is very cool to control a computer with hand gestures – and I’d be the first to scrap my mouse – it will be interesting to see exactly how this “minority report” technology will ultimately be adapted (vs other emerging interface technologies, like say voice navigation). Its great for molding virtual clay, and not an ideal way to navigate a spreadsheet, but where the exact sweet spot for gesture technology is has yet to be determined. What is for certain is that a lot of people are definitely interested in finding out. Leap Motion is taking pre-orders, and at $79.99, sales are in the hundreds of thousands.
Google Glasses were also featured in a keynote this year, and the debate rages as to whether sporting these devices will in fact get technology out of the way, or turn us all in to “glassholes”. For more on this see the related article in The Verge:
3) A MakerBot Scanner!
MakerBot announced a 3-D scanner at their SXSW keynote. This is just really cool. Way cooler than the line-ups to get a picture with grumpy cat.
Until now, the problem with 3-D printers was the need to model an object in 3-D before you could print it. Now with the 3-D scanner, you can scan an object in 3-D, and simply feed it into a 3-D printer when you need another one!
This year’s SXSW has taught me that we are one step closer to the Star Trek, but it’ll probably be a while before we can replicate tomato soup.
4) The Quantified Self
There is continued interest in, and many panels about the quantified self-movement. This movement quantifies how new technology and devices enable us to track and learn more about our health, our moods, and performance.
It’s worth noting that until recently this has been a very grass roots movement, with over one hundred Self Quantified groups in 31 countries around the world and growing.
Products like Nike+ Fuelband, Jawbone up, and Fitbit are tapping in to and growing this movement, and we can expect to see a lot more on the market soon.
Once these products start opening up their APIs to developers and agencies, so that third parties can get access to and mine this data, we can expect to see a lot more innovation and growth in this area.
This will lead to powerful and innovative ways to connect consumers more closely with brands. And much more importantly , if you’ll allow me to get all utopian about it, self quantification holds the promise of bettering humans by the provision of objective and quantifiable data. The tradeoff is that also has the potential to contribute big time to the data glut (See trend number 2 above).
5) Mezcal is really awesome!
I thought sipping tequila was where its at, but Austin has taught me that Mezcal is the way to go. If you get a chance, try a flight here or here.
6) How much bigger can this festival get?
Like every year, it seems that the festival is getting bigger, and more international. It just doesn’t seem like it could possible grow any more, but each year it does. The interesting part of this is that it would appear as if Austin’s infrastructure can’t really handle this anymore. Just ask anyone who stayed at a house or hotel 30 miles out from the conference, or ask the people who spent a few hours out in the rain at 2am trying desperately to catch a cab or a shuttle bus.
It will be interesting to see how the festival organizers try to resolve the challenges that result from continued growth at SXSWi in 2014.
Pretty exciting for us as new members to Soda to have some stuff in the latest SoDA Report (Volume 1, 2013). Last year the SoDA Report become on of the most read publication in the digital marketing world with over 65,000 readers.
We are proud members of SoDA along with our fellow 70 member agencies in 22 countries on 5 continents and honoured to be apart of this years SoDA Report. SoDA has become the leading voice of the digital agency community, representing the top tier of digital agencies and the most sought after production companies in the world.
We have a great team heading out to SXSW this week. If you happen to be heading to SXSW, drop us an email and we can discuss digital over some barbecue, plus if you’re interested, we may have a few super-awesome-exclusive invites to a special event on Monday night you probably don’t want to miss. Follow our team on the ground Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for updates from Austin.
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