Lacey Walsh, Trend Hunter (INTERVIEW)

Lacey Walsh has a penchant for hilarious beer commercials, especially the Carlsberg Friendship Test. This interactive publicity stunt allowed best friends to prank each other. One friend would call the other in the small hours of the morning, asking him/her to come to a mysterious location with a ton of cash to bail them out of a poker game gone wrong. The friend would show up with the money, but would eventually realize that the whole thing was a ruse, and be rewarded with an ice cold Carlsberg.

When she's not trolling YouTube for the best and funniest ads of the year, Lacey loves watching TV, exploring Toronto and dreaming about hanging out with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. She also plans on conquering the world, but is holding off until she's built up her Trend Hunter portfolio.

1.What’s a trend that’s caught your eye lately?

A trend I really like is prank advertising. More specifically, I want to talk about friendship-testing beer ads. Basically, this is a campaign from Carlsberg where they helped a couple guys test some friendships. They essentially set up this fake dangerous poker game, and had these people call their friends in the middle of the night to ask if they could come and bail them out of a scary situation. So you get to watch these people show up at a terrifying warehouse, they get patted down, go through a series of terrifying rooms and meet crazy people, and then, at the end, when they find their friend at the poker table, a curtain drops and everyone gets a Carlsberg for passing the friendship test. I thought that was pretty amazing. We all have who we love and would do anything for, and it’s nice to see these people coming through for each other.

2.What did you do before you came to Trend Hunter?

Before Trend Hunter, I was a student at Nipissing University. I studied English and History. I kind of wanted to be a teacher, but I realized pretty quickly that I’d rather write. Now I’m here and I love it!

3.How would you describe the work environment at Trend Hunter?

The work environment at Trend Hunter really contributes to the overall success of the company. When you walk in, everybody’s smiling and happy, and it’s just a really great community of creative people. We keep each other focused, and we feed off of each other’s creative energy, so it’s really great to work here.

4.Describe your trend writing process. How do you go about finding and writing about trends?

My trend writing process basically involves me spending way too much time on the Internet and listening to dubstep. I just look for anything that I think sticks out to me; anything I want to tell my friends about.

5.What’s the best part about working at Trend Hunter?

The best part about working at Trend Hunter is that I’m building up a crazy portfolio, and it’s extremely diverse. I have almost 400 published articles already, so that’s really exciting.

6.What’s the most important thing you’ve learned so far at Trend Hunter?

The most important thing I’ve learned so far is probably the impact that social media can have on a business’s success. We use Twitter and Facebook and things like that every day, but we don’t realize how important those things are to success in the business world.

7.What did you want to be when you were younger?

When I was growing up, I pretty much wanted to be April O’Neil from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles -- but this is kind of better in a way…I would still like to hang out with ninja turtles.

8.What’s been your biggest accomplishment so far?

Moving from a teeny tiny town to a big city and joining an internship at Trend Hunter Magazine is pretty much my biggest accomplishment yet, but we’ll see. I’m still working on conquering the world, so I’ll let you guys know.

9.Any last thoughts on Trend Hunter?

If you’re looking for a great internship, and you want to work with really cool people, and learn a lot, definitely come to Trend Hunter – it’s an amazing place to be!