Field Notes: The Media School Travel Blog

Engine Group’s floor in a New York City office building seems simple enough. It’s set up like a normal office: cubicles everywhere and people working at their desks or moving around for meetings.

One of the walls by the entrance has Engine’s logo on it — just the word “engine” in a sleek black font, with the letter “i” in red. It’s simple, but clean and commanding.

We walked around the office to see how the company is set up, touring the floor and getting a feel for how Engine worked. The coolest part of the tour was seeing examples of the work they did, such as a social media campaign they did for HBO’s “The Sopranos,” in which they gave a Soprano-based nickname to anybody who replied to the tweet. The original tweet got more than 300 million engagements, all without spending any money on campaigning. They also showed us a more recent campaign for Jagermeister, where they put ads on billboards, bus station stops and television. Since visiting Engine, I’ve even seen the ad two or three times on television at home.

We also met with IU alumnus and Engine Group chairman Paul Caine, BA’86, who gave us great insight into how an IU student can follow a path like his. He talked about how he moved around within his field, but he went straight to New York to find employment because he knew that’s where the major jobs were for advertising.

As we got a feel for the company, the bland, cubicle-filled office seemed to speak more to the company — the whole place felt like an environment that prioritized its employees and produced great work because of it.