On Friday, October 21, OCS hosted its “AMP Expo” for students interested in careers in advertising, marketing, and public relations. The office buzzed all afternoon with curious students and animated representatives from over a dozen companies, speaking about job and internship opportunities in the communication field.
Before the Expo began, seven representatives from various companies sat on a panel and spoke about the different aspects of advertising, marketing, and public relations. Panelists included Dave Lipson, an executive at Schwartz MSL; Vanessa Apicemo, manager of technology practice at Burson-Marsteller; Trang Phan, a business intelligence analyst at Wayfair; Jackie Coffey, a sales planner at Pandora Radio; Kevin Kinkor, the head of staff at Pandora Radio; Lina Valov, a brand manager at Procter & Gamble, and Alice Bertholin-Rice, a human resources employee at Oglivy & Mather.
The panelists first addressed the required background needed to find a job in communications. Where some professions demand a specific college degree, communications focus more on the practice of certain talents than the transcript itself. All panelists agreed that it is more important for a candidate to be able to work successfully in a specific environment than to have credentials without the ability to put their learned skills to use.
What are the necessary skills for a communications employee to have? Primarily, a marketing position, according to Lipson, revolves around “tell[ing] the truth persuasively.” Lipson emphasized the importance of a certain skill-set: being able to write well and to think strategically. “It’s a fast moving profession,” Lipson said, “so you first need to be able to think in a fast moving environment.”
Several other panelists echoed the importance of story-telling. For one, Apicemo focuses on conveying straightforward “stories” in her marketing strategy. “It’s important to be able to tell a story in a way that even my grandma can understand it,” she said. Maintaining simplicity while also morphing one’s strategy in relation to the contemporary macro- and micro-trends is imperative to the public relations world. “In this profession, you really need to have a finger on the pulse of what’s going on at the time and be able to react strategically,” she stressed.
For panelist Phan, it is important to tell a story in a persuasive way as well as to understand one’s customers. “The worst thing is to market something to someone that’s completely irrelevant,” she said, because then the entire marketing effort is useless. Phan emphasized the importance of recognizing what a customer wants and how to make a product seem appealing to him or her.
However, working in marketing and advertising is not all about the customers: much of the position revolves around team projects and group efforts in the office. “Everything is very collaborative,” Apicemo explained, “on both local and global teams.” Kinkor highlighted the work dynamic of an individual being “only one piece of a much larger picture.”
With the clear emphasis on collaboration in this industry, all panelists recognized the importance of showing leadership and motivation in an interview for a job in these fields. “We want to know you’re passionate and bent on succeeding,” saidKinkor. In terms of interview strategy, Kirkland-Rice stressed the ability to “manage people and be forceful in a changing work environment.”
In their short hour of sitting on the panel, these professionals in the advertising and marketing worlds brought out one of the most important aspects of the industry: the many different skill-sets it takes to be successful in these fields. Most of all, said Valov, “we all need to be creative, in order to bring out the best that every brand has to give.”
— Julia Eger, ‘14
