One Storyteller’s Journey Into Marketing
I’m no stranger to the art of storytelling. I always knew that my career, whatever it may be, would have something to do with it. As an NYU student getting my master’s in Integrated Marketing, I’m finding every day how essential storytelling is to the job. Still, it’s been a bit of a winding road to get here.
As a college student, I majored in English literature and history, immersing myself in great works of fiction and the true epics of humankind’s past. Translating that into some sort of profession though was the hard part. I struck gold when a friend, who loved my movie recommendations, suggested I start a blog. I’d written reviews for our school newspaper where he’d been a copy-editor, so he knew I had the writing chops.
What started as a small blog critiquing movies and television shows grew into more than just a hobby. Even as I worked a day job in the garment industry, I worked freelance, writing for other small blogs, and then bigger game, like Forbes, where I became a contributor for their Hollywood & Entertainment vertical. I wrote unflinching reviews about the latest TV shows and passionate essays about the film industry.
One day, all of my hard work seemed to pay off. An interview for a dream job landed right in my lap — one as a TV critic for TV Guide Magazine. I left my job at a wholesale children’s clothing company, where I’d worked for almost four years, and started as a full time writer. Finally. My mom joked that I’d taken my TV addiction and turned it into an actual career. Happily ever after right? Not exactly.
I don’t know if any of you have noticed, but journalism isn’t having a great time of things right now. The industry is shrinking, and print journalism in particular seems to be on its way out. I can’t say that after a year and a half of working at TV Guide I was surprised when I was laid off. Still, no one expects on a random Tuesday morning to suddenly not have a job anymore. My boss sat down with me and very kindly explained that everyone there loved my work, they just couldn’t afford to keep me.
The thing is, getting another job, specifically one as an entertainment journalist, proved more than challenging. As I said, the industry is shrinking, and there are a lot more writers than there are jobs. Every time I saw on social media that some prominent publication had had another large layoff, my heart sank. Did I even really want to be in an industry with this much upheaval?
Sometimes I think we have to go through something like this to find something better. I love writing about television, and I even still do it for fun sometimes, but as I job searched, I started to realize there was more than one way to incorporate storytelling into one’s career. As I perused open positions that called for brand and advertising experts, I thought about how marketers weave a narrative for their products. They were storytellers too. What would it mean to come up with creative ways to market good products to the people who needed them?
Well, falling down that rabbit hole led me here, as a marketing student, so that I could gain the important skills listed in all of these job openings that I craved to fill. As I take classes on brand management, advertising, and digital marketing, I become more and more convinced I made the right decision. An industry that calls for people who are creative, excellent writers, and know how to engage an audience? I’m here for it.
You can expect more posts from here as I continue my marketing journey, explore the ins and outs of the field, and how we can see this playing out in real life with real companies. I promise to be as fearless with my opinions, shrewd in my analysis, and witty in my writing as I was when I was writing TV reviews. Stay tuned.
