Most kids looking for summer employment reduce themselves to getting coffee, flipping burgers or shoveling poo, but Bozell offers another option. Bozell has been recognized for an outstanding summer internship program. The application is rigorous: seeking only the most talented students to fulfill roles in various agency departments. Our objective this year was to create a fun and easy-to-use online application site for the intern program. We wanted to draw many quality applicants and a bit of traffic recognition for Bozell.

With a very small budget, Bozell decided to use their interactive talents to build a photo-submission site called WhatACrappyJob.com. Everyday since its launch in late 2009, the site published at least one post featuring a crappy job. Staff helped to spread the link via their personal social media channels. The URL was also included in information packets which were mailed to roughly 200 university contacts. Additional efforts included a small, $400 ad buy which ran on regretsy.com for a total of five weeks prior to the application deadline.

The two most easily recognizable results obtained for this site were the data from the site traffic and the number of applications received. The previous intern outreach effort resulted in our intern site receiving roughly 1,300 unique visits (traffic recorded from Dec.1, 2008 through March 1, 2009) and around 50 intern applications. This year, our intern outreach effort from WhatACrappyJob.com resulted in 8,148 unique visits (traffic recorded from Dec.1, 2009 to March 1, 2010) and more than 100 intern applications. This 527% increase in site traffic and 100% increase in applicants signify a successful interactive effort. This effort also dramatically increased the amount of international interest in our program. Our internship coordinators talked to about 25 interested international students and educators.