This week began with additional responsibilities. I have been taught how to operate Humour Me’s Ads Manager account and am now in charge of promoting Arctic Fox’s social media posts and defining target audiences (in addition to managing the brand’s social media content creation and its deployment) until we find a new Digital Manager.

We have also been looking for a full-time Editor, and are glad to announce that we have found one. Our new team member has worked with us before and already understands our systems and processes, so he has seamlessly integrated himself into the company.

In other news, the team has noticed multiple similarities between my intern and me, the most prominent of which is that we both tend to rock back and forth in our seats when we are concentrating. I take these similarities as a good sign.

With regard to the Red Fort show, the sheer scale of the project has led to a re-assessment of its execution timeline. We often come across timeline issues when they are set by the client instead of us. We know how much work will be involved in every project and therefore make sure to set realistic deadlines that we can meet. There are quite a few brands who (understandably) do not possess detailed knowledge about production, and therefore end up setting unachievable deadlines. With the Red Fort project, we want to make sure that we create an excellent show, which is why we have taken a breather to evaluate the work required and set a realistic timeline.

Another tendency a lot of brands have is to abruptly suspend projects that have already gone into production. While this is not much of a problem for us, it severely affects those we collaborate with. When we choose to collaborate with other teams, we prepare a production schedule in advance, and those teams block their time accordingly. If the project is suddenly cancelled, our reputation takes a hit as we have wasted our partners’ time. It is even worse when a project is put on hold indefinitely, as in that case we cannot promise our teams when it will resume, which is highly unprofessional. We have been in situations where we have had to assemble an entirely new team of collaborators because a project was put on hold and the previous team took up other work which meant that they could not join us when the project resumed.

The client, however, faces absolutely no consequences.

We have recently posted some new job openings on our website, one of which is the position of Creative Director. One applicant for this position said that she was interested in our company because our name implied that we created ‘humorous content’. This is not the first time this has happened, and I feel I must clarify the etymology of our name. The ‘humour’ in Humour Me has nothing to do with comedy. Our name stems from the kind of work we do, which is often audacious and disruptive. A lot of our work is the first of its kind, which is the reason we tell you to ‘humour us’, as in ‘hear us out’.

The same candidate also told her interviewer that he ‘seemed like a ladies’ man’, which added to the bank of things I would never have imagined would be said in a professional scenario.

See you next week!