Advice for Students Interested in Careers in Public Relations and Advertising
We asked local professionals for advice for a student or recent graduate looking for a career in PR.
Go into the career with eyes wide open and maintain your enthusiasm. The hours can be long. The work can be frustrating at times. Clients or internal expectations can often be wildly unreasonable (every organization will say “we’d really like to be in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal” – and I’d really like a pony, but I’m not going to get one. Here’s the upside: When you work in PR, your work is very visible. A basic news release can catch the attention of the CEO, for example. A great story in a newspaper or online media outlet or TV can be game-changing for an upstart brand. When bad stuff happens, people turn to the PR team to fix the crisis. Being an effective communicator can make your work stand out from everyone else in the organization.
That’s a double-edge sword, because PR people also hear a lot of needless chatter from the sidelines like “why did the TV station focus on THAT part of the story?” You’ll face a lot of nitpicking. I usually just smile and think to myself, “the CEO doesn’t even know your name, buddy.” Maybe that’s a little smug, but PR people often take a lot of flak. You have to learn how to deal with the flack. The visibility of PR work is the root of this phenomenon.
Bob who works in accounting manages spreadsheets – the spreadsheet and numbers are visible. Bob’s role rarely is. The PR pro? She or he are at the forefront of the company’s public persona. Good or bad. It can be high intensity. It can be really frustrating. And it can be amazing when stuff goes really well.
In your opinion, what makes a great advertisement?
Honesty, passion, you have to bring out something from the service or product that stirs something, it has to make you FEEL something. I think a lot of what makes a good ad is to bring to light something new, and as a reader, it makes you laugh or maybe think twice about something. An ad should bring out emotion and life. That means you hit something, an emotion, a nerve, and advertising is supposed to do that. It’s not suppose to just exist and fill up a wall. It’s suppose to make you go, “huh wow.” “Do I love that? Do I hate that?”
Tell me about work as a copywriter, please.
As a copywriter I work hand in hand with an art person. So I will then with a team come up with an idea for our client, and then basically create a storyboard for the ad, then have to communicate the vision with the art person, then all the ideas and finishing works have to be cleared with not only the client but with the project manager and art manager. You can’t bank on your idea being the best idea, because at the end of the day, you’re trying to communicate as the voice of your client. So What does that sound like? What is your client trying to say within this ad?
It’s also the copywriter’s job to follow the brand’s rules, like some don’t use contractions or the Oxford comma, and we have to know these rules ahead of time in order to create something that has continuity with all of that brand’s messaging. For example, “Heath care,” sometimes it’s one word (“healthcare”) and sometimes its two (“health care”).
Creative writing is completely different than writing for an Ad. You have to know every rule and know how to break every rule.
What kind of writing do you do every day?
On a daily basis it can be all over the place. We can have 1 client at a time or we can have like 6 clients. I work on priority, so what projects are due, what’s hot and what’s not, how I’m feeling. If I’m not feeling like writing an ad, I can shift gears to an email ad for another client. It really is all about the priority of your projects. I can write any way in any given day. Really a lot of times, it’s how you’re feeling. When it comes down to it, you get a ton of different materials, like you might have an ad order for a billboard, video, and email. When communicating to the designer, you’ll write different instructions for them and they’ll do it because you’re writing the ad.
What other writing skills do you need for your work?
I mean it’s really just getting everything done on time and that’s where I come in. I write creative briefs, basically a summary of what the project is, what are we actually going to do and what’s it going to cost. Al a lot of the time, doesn’t even know this stuff. A brief is a 1 page doc to inform copywriters on the outline of the ad.
I’m very interested in commercial creation. How would I get into commercial advertising?
Start creating. Just make a commercial yourself. Building a portfolio of work that you can show what you’ve created is great. So if you want to make commercials go and make one. Then use it as learning experience. Use it to build your portfolio. Bring people together, and collaborate together making something. Or grab a product that’s been bugging you, and redesign something. Students should just reach out to companies and see if they need any help with writing, or commercial creation. That’s the best way to get known.
