There are great content strategy opportunities for students at Facebook, like our internship program and the Facebook Content Strategy Fellowship.
To raise awareness by our fellowship application deadline on Friday, March 17, I wrote this post as part of a series from Facebook’s content strategists about the diverse paths we’ve taken to content strategy.
How chasing my ad dreams landed me a content strategy job at Facebook
When your father’s a photographer, you end up wanting to be creative when you grow up, too. When you’re in college and living off Papa John’s and Hamburger Helper because that’s all you can afford, there’s no question you want to be creative in a way that pays. So I decided to major in advertising and focus on copywriting.
Things like the internet, apps, or mobile phones didn’t exist back then (I went to school a long time ago, folks). In those days, advertising consisted of print, TV, and radio, and a copywriter’s main collaborator was the designer/art director. We were taught to create pithy one-liners; headlines and taglines that would build brands before the word “brand” was even a thing.
And ads were just that: ads. They didn’t lead to websites, tie into emails, promote not-so-subtle product endorsements, or create immersive experiences. They were just ads and they were my world. I enviously flipped through Communication Art annuals, dreaming (hoping) that one day my work would grace those pages. That I’d saunter through the doors of Leo Burnett, BBDO, J. Walter Thompson, or Ogilvy & Mather (because in this fantasy, I had the pick of the top tier litter) and be the next creative genius that would come up with slogans as memorable as “Just Do It” or “Maybe she’s born with it” (because in this fantasy, I was).
But you know what else I was born with? Shyness. And the thing about ad agencies is that you have to excel at selling yourself to get in the door and sell a client’s products. I was told, “If you really want it, you’ve got to be really vocal to prove how much,” but I just couldn’t present myself in a way that didn’t feel authentic or catapulted me so far outside of my comfort zone. My classes taught me to pitch ideas; I never learned how to pitch myself.
So I took a different path — one that still took me through the doors of Leo Burnett, but as a public relations intern. While I got to do research for an Oldsmobile Super Bowl commercial, organize events with Major League Baseball teams for True Value, and coordinate radio interviews for the Maytag Repairman, I realized PR wasn’t my calling. I decided to try non-profit and got a job organizing special events at a zoo. While I got to coordinate fun occasions for people (and feed a sloth), I realized I’d rather attend parties than plan them.
PR called again and quickly hung up when the dot com bubble burst. Unencumbered, I saw my newfound unemployment as an opportunity to get closer to what I knew I wanted and got a job in marketing at a Japanese comic book and animation company. The team was small and the creative possibilities were big. Soon, I became the one writing all of the ads, trailers, TV commercials, promo packaging, retail signage, event collateral, and more; as copywriter, project manager, and design manager, I was running a small internal agency of my own.
While copywriting was one piece of my job, I wanted it to be the only piece. Another layoff came, and along with it, another opportunity. There was a job writing about TV I wanted so badly that I followed up about it once a month. After getting no response after three attempts, I made one last gesture and offered to work for free for two weeks to show them what I could do. While I was still shy, I unknowingly learned how to pitch myself.
It worked (and it paid), so I spent the next year writing social media, banners, and scripts for videos that I personally had to recite on camera. I was pushed out of my comfort zone in ways I could never have imagined, but it helped me develop a more conversational voice and tone, and gave me the chance to interview one of my favorite actors from my childhood. Jobs mapping out and creating content for websites, emails, blog posts, app descriptions, and in-product user flows soon followed.
My college fantasy was becoming a reality and changing with the times and technology. I wasn’t in advertising, but by following the path that led me everywhere but an ad agency, I learned how to talk to people from every possible angle. My career detours in PR, events, and marketing gave me the exact experience I needed to become a content strategist: The ability to look at every possible entry point and determine what message gets seen where. The ability to work cross-functionally with designers, product managers, product marketers, researchers, and engineers to develop a straightforward user flow. The ability to speak up for what will feel best for the people using Facebook and its products (even if I’m still a bit shy myself).
I may not be gracing the pages of advertising award annuals, but as a content strategist, I get to develop and write things that people around the world see on a daily basis. I help build the brands that those ad agencies I once dreamed about try to win as clients. My actual career is so much more than the one I fantasized about all those years (decades) ago.
Check out stories from Grant Shellen and Sara Getz on their career paths to content strategy.
