Day: May 29, 2018

This is part of a larger series called the Vox Creative Grad Guide. Gelato traces its roots all the way back to winters in Ancient Rome, when fruit would fall from trees into the snow. Romans would squeeze lemon juice over the syrupy snow and eat it as a frozen treat. Eventually, they would pack this snow and ice under hay and bring it down from the mountains to cellars in Rome — a refrigeration system of sorts. It’s not clear where exactly in Italy gelato as we know it today came from, but by the 1860s, ice cream machines imported from the United States made large-scale gelato production possible. Now, Italian gelato is known and beloved by people around the world. All this I learned from Nazzareno Giolitti, the fourth-generation owner of Giolitti, the longest-running family-owned gelateria in Rome. We were sitting around a small round table on the tourist-filled cobblestone street outside his restaurant, a translator between us and a group of nuns chatting and eating their ice cream cones happily nearby. It was in that moment that I realized that I was putting into practice exactly what I had learned from my anthropology classes in college at work — and how grateful I was to be able to do so. What you learn in school shows up in unexpected ways. I didn’t expect to end up applying what I had learned in school into such direct use at my job. I’m a writer at Vox Creative, where I research, write, and story produce branded content videos in partnership with advertisers that run across Vox Media’s eight networks. In Rome, we were shooting a video about the traditional and modern sides of Roman cuisine for a hotel rewards card advertiser. We visited the proprietors of historical and new bakeries, restaurants, food stands, and gelaterias, and asked them about their stories and the processes behind their foods. In anthropology, you learn how to write an ethnography — a study of a particular society or culture based on interviews and participant observation, or immersing yourself in a culture and trying to understand it from the “inside.” Anthropology teaches you to listen, to ask questions, and to try to understand. I graduated from Princeton in May of 2015 with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, a certificate in humanistic studies, and no idea what I was going to do with my life — except that I wanted to be creative. I didn’t know what branded content was when I was in college, much less did I expect to be making it as my job. Most of my peers went on to consulting, finance, tech, or academia. The first two years out of college were challenging. I had graduated with high expectations and hopes, but little confidence in what was the right first step to take in achieving them. Don’t wait for someone to hire you to do what you want to do. There is no one clear path to any career, especially writing. I once heard someone say that you become a “writer” as soon as you, well, start writing. Don’t wait for someone to hire you to do it. In fact, the best way to get someone to hire you to write is to already have clips of your writing to show. I’ve written articles about tech for a startup, humor pieces for a satire website, and essays and lists for a food website. I got the food writing gig through a silly list about Pokémon Go that I posted on Medium. I’ve also written my fair share of unanswered pitches. We live in a time where, for better or worse, the internet has made it so that you never know who will end up seeing what you put out there. But if you have the time, resources, and discipline to start writing, making videos, taking photographs, or whatever it is you ultimately want to be doing — even if you don’t think it’s good enough yet — just start doing it. Pursuing a creative career requires risk. That said, from what I’ve seen in my few years working in media, pursuing a career in the arts and entertainment is a privilege that requires a leap of faith — and a safety net. My first job out of college was a full-time marketing fellowship at a business news startup that paid $25,000 per year. In addition to writing, I also tutored and even tried secret shopping on the side. I went home to New Jersey on weekends to avoid spending money on going out and to do my laundry and eat for free. Not everyone has the option to fall back on their parents’ health insurance plan and financial (and emotional) support. And a lot of jobs in the arts or production are freelance or permalance, meaning that you’re paid by the day or by project and aren’t entitled to full-time employment benefits such as healthcare, retirement plans, or paid leave. If you don’t work, you don’t get paid. And a lot of the time, work comes through people you know. The reality of these creative paths limits the socioeconomic demographics of the people who are able to pursue them, which, in turn, can influence the type of content they create. Diversity of viewpoints is crucial in creative fields. Just as anthropologists bring their own inherent, if unconscious, cultural biases to the situation they observe, so too do writers, directors, producers, and creators of all sorts. At their worst, these biases can result in tone-deaf or offensive content. But biases can also manifest themselves in more subtle ways — in the demographics of the talent that appear on screen, the questions asked in an interview, the stories that are chosen to be told. Anthropology is not perfect. The field has its own flawed history of centuries of imperialist and colonialist modes of inquiry that have led to lasting ramifications on the communities affected by this research. But its current emphasis on constantly interrogating

This is part of a larger series called the Vox Creative Grad Guide. Like many college students, I graduated without knowing what I was going to do with my liberal arts degree. I had majored in political science only to find that I didn’t want to work in government or go to law school. Instead, I became fascinated with journalism and its role in democracy. The Internet completely disrupted the way we produce and consume media, and the simultaneous role that media played as a check on government and as a corporation began to raise serious ethical questions. But I wasn’t content just pondering questions — I wanted to be in the thick of it and better understand how the monetization of media was going to evolve in the real world. So, I began my search by looking into new media companies that were flipping the traditional ways that media makes money. I found that new companies like BuzzFeed and Vox were experimenting and creating a lot of industry buzz — native advertising, ads that mirrored the editorial content we enjoy consuming. And they needed people who had both a creative penchant for great content ideas as well as a strategic mindset that could break down an advertiser’s objectives. I started as an intern supporting the marketing team at large but quickly became interested in creative strategy, a team within Vox Creative, Vox Media’s in-house creative studio. And throughout my career, I have found that my liberal arts education has helped me in ways I hadn’t thought it would. Because I had taken so many classes that weren’t “career-related” but were still genuinely interesting to me, I was able to come up with truly unique, out-of-the-box content ideas. Whether it was philosophy of religion or gender studies, I leaned on these interests from my classes to ideate concepts that didn’t feel like clickbait but rather like something people actually wanted to read or watch (check out the first campaign I sold, Going Gray, Explained.) I also utilized the critical thinking skills I had sharpened during college to create campaigns that were strategically sound. I constantly ask myself: What’s the thesis of the idea? Does the program ladder back to the client’s objectives? Are my examples convincing? And this commitment pays off when clients not only love the creative idea, but also understand how the campaign will attract their audience. So, to all the liberal arts students out there, here’s my advice: Be confident in what you’ve learned in college, because those foundational skills will set you apart not only in advertising, but in any career. I’m so glad that I chose a career path that allows me to be more holistic in my work; it’s one that I would recommend to recent grads. by Diane Kim, 2016 graduate

This is part of a larger series called the Vox Creative Grad Guide. RFP. KPI. CTR. More three-word acronyms floated in and out of the conference room phone’s speakers as I sweated and struggled to keep up in my notes. What would all of these acronyms and business jargon mean for me and my job? The only abbreviation I had come out of journalism school knowing was “TK,” a magazine and printing shorthand for “to come,” or words to be filled in at a later date, closer to publication. Now I was sitting on my first client kickoff call, an account director and RVP on either side of me, a team of producers infinitely more knowledgeable than myself, and my editor, who gave me an assuring nod. I’d get the hang of it, I hoped. Starting at Vox Media on its native advertising team, Vox Creative, I felt as though “TK” could have described my career up to that point. I graduated from the University of Colorado’s journalism school in 2010 with a news-editorial major. It’s not lost on me that less than a year after I graduated, the Board of Regents moved to shut down the journalism school to rebrand and restructure the entire school. (The school has since been reaccredited.) It was a less than ideal time to enter the print industry, looking for entry-level work. So to pursue my dreams of moving to New York City and to affirm my skills as a journalist and editor — as my dad always told me, “You go to college to get an education, and grad school to gain a skill set” — I entered the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications for an expedited MA in magazine, print, and online journalism. Surrounded by professors from New York’s glossiest publications, it was hard not to fall in love with newspapers, magazines, and the industry as a whole. Even sprinting through campus to report on a (faked) hostage situation gave me a renewed confidence in the career that I was pursuing. My team of students created a magazine concept that was prototyped for a final thesis project. (It was an iPad magazine app, if that gives you a guess as to how old I am now.) I moved to New York City after graduating in 2011, and everything I thought I knew about the industry turned out to be drastically different from reality. Magazines went digital, social media grew exponentially, and publishers desperately sought the secret sauce for pageviews. My first employer — a food and drink digital website — relied heavily on SEO, paid traffic, and syndication to hit lofty goals that even then I knew to be inflated and unrealistic. Those early years in my career were a crash course in strategy, readership, and storytelling for new audiences. Truth be told, I burned out from the editorial world quickly. Sourcing new and interesting stories became a grueling process, especially on a startup team with little support or resources. I freelanced after that first job to figure out what I wanted in my next career move, and after some trial and error, grew comfortable in content marketing. I worked in sponsored content for a small Brooklyn publisher, learned the ropes of interfacing with clients, and oversaw a content calendar that matched up with the advertisers’ wants and needs. That led me to Vox Creative, the in-house agency for Vox Media. And the first few months were a rollercoaster. Instead of editorial brainstorms and check-ins with managing editors, I was sitting in on client calls and pre-production meetings for branded content. I had to relearn an editorial process in which agencies also acted as top editor on my stories. And I learned the ins and outs of digital advertising from liaising with different teams across the revenue organization — video production, ad operations, client management sales, and marketing, to name just a few. The challenges of learning the ropes of branded content are better summed up by Melanie Deziel, a fellow Syracuse alumnae and consultant I’ve had the pleasure to work with, in her essay about the “three-month slump” of branded content. What I thought I knew about storytelling was turned on its head. What did it mean to be a storyteller for an advertiser? And what did it mean to the Vox Media audience, who can smell BS from a mile away? In large part due to our superior journalists, editors, and producers at Vox Media’s editorial brands, the Vox reader has come to expect only the best content and expects no less from its branded content. Still, what excited me about branded content then is what excites me about it today. Every new campaign is a challenge, a puzzle to be solved, one that both fits the client KPIs and feels at home within the superior content network of our brands. I learned to flex my strategic muscles while editing for different platforms, audiences, and competing asks. Now I help lead creative work for clients across categories and help shape our team and company strategy in producing branded content for all eight Vox Media networks. The work has tested my skills as an editor and a creative storyteller, and has given me new insight into the side of the business I would have never seen before. I’m often asked if I miss journalism or the editorial world, or if I would ever go back to the other side of publishing. There are days when I’m envious of my colleagues’ freedom in storytelling, and days when I miss speaking the language of editorial over revenue. But in my work in advertising, I feel deep gratification for the work of those who sit on the revenue side of publishing. Their sales enable the very talented journalists at Vox Media to produce their best work. Without topnotch strategists, sellers, and account management, their stories would echo into a chamber. I’ll never brag that a photo essay or a Facebook video is what’s keeping the

This is part of a larger series called the Vox Creative Grad Guide. I came to Vox Media to produce branded content, whatever that is. I figured it would be more of the same of what I was used to doing: Longer-form content meant to live online with an end card of “insert brand here.” Don’t get me wrong, I was totally OK with that. In my mind (and definitely my mind only) I’m a free-spirited documentary filmmaker whose purpose in life is to tell beautifully shot stories and bring awareness to the world. If a brand wanted to get in on that action, fine by me. However, it wasn’t until I was dropped so far out of my element that I came to understand the extent of what branded content could be — and how much fun it was to make. What I was dropped into was a cooking competition with the size and scale of a proper television show, The Game Day Grub Match. It took me a while to figure out my niche in the entertainment business. I’ve been on many different types of productions and held a lot of strange jobs in the industry. I started out in China working in reality television. The show was The Amazing Race: China Rush. This was the Chinese version of the show and had everything the American version of the show had, minus the production budget and experienced crew. This was a solid month on the road visiting 12 cities across China, and shooting fifteen-hour days. Apparently my six months of professional, post-college experience was enough to land me the role of game producer. As game producers, our job was to figure out the race route, to write the clues, and to come up with all of the different challenges the contestants would have to endure. I made them do some pretty awful things, like eat bugs, turtles, and ungodly amounts of fried rice. There were other things too, but the eating challenges definitely stick out. China wasn’t all talk shows and reality television. It was there I was introduced to branded documentaries. When I worked at a small production company, we were able to tell unique and longer form stories that happened to incorporate a brand. It was my first taste of branded content, and I was into it. We profiled local Chinese artists for Adidas, toured factories in central China, and even followed Kevin Durant on his first China tour for Nike. I eventually moved to New York City to work in traditional advertising, which was creatively stimulating. But I missed the hands-on, scrappy approach to branded content. So I came to Vox Creative thinking I knew what branded content was. I thought I knew everything the world of branded content had to offer, but was quickly mistaken when I entered the Grub Match. The Game Day Grub Match, to be exact. My first big shoot for Vox Creative would in fact be the biggest I had ever produced. It was even bigger than a Chinese reality show and would be in no way what I thought branded content was. The Grub Match was a full-on cooking competition with celebrity chefs and former NFL players as the contestants. We had to shoot three episodes in a single day and shoot on a football field in December. For this shoot, I took to what I call “the floating duck approach.” On the top I’m bobbing along confidently, but underneath my legs were flailing. To be honest, you could probably see the flailing in my face as well. But once we got moving, it was incredibly exciting and fulfilling. We were making a TV show! We had a TV director, a TV crew, TV talent, and an amazing TV set that we built in an indoor soccer facility in Jersey. The only thing it wasn’t was actually on TV. So what’s the point? Is it for me to talk myself up after producing a shoot? Definitely not. The point is that the medium is constantly changing and there should be no barriers as to what branded content is or what it can be. It can be as big as a Grub Match, or it could be a personal documentary profile. Whatever it is, I like making it and I’m along for the ride. by AJ Gutierrez, 2009 graduate

This is part of a larger series called the Vox Creative Grad Guide. KAMRAM DRAEGER, 2015 GRADUATE Creative Strategist Back in high school, I would spend most of my time playing video games and watching countless shows and videos online. I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do with myself, but I had a passion for all these things, and I wanted to turn that into a career. Something that stuck with me was a quote by Burnie Burns I heard about 10 years ago: “If you’re going to waste your time doing something, you might as well make money off of it.” “If you’re going to waste your time doing something, you might as well make money off of it.” While I hadn’t the faintest clue about which job was right for me, I knew working in digital media was the place to be. I started viciously seeking out internships, part-time jobs, and work experience placements. With every role I took on, I gained a better appreciation for the industry, and how I could apply myself. As part-time gigs transitioned into freelance work and ultimately full-time jobs, I reached a point where I understood my strengths, and gained a critical eye for the things I am passionate about. I continued to spend most of my free time consuming digital media (and playing video games when I could), but had come to recognize why the creators and publishers I admired were not only entertaining, but distinguished from others. It’s this understanding that has brought me to a career at Vox Media. I look up to the talent I’m surrounded by, and am proud of the work we put out here. As a Creative Strategist I’ve found a job that matches my strengths, while allowing me to work on the things I love to obsess over. KEENYA SCOTT, 2005 GRADUATE Content Manager Some of the best advice I’ve ever received was from my uncle, a Dean at Tufts University, over Thanksgiving vacation one year. I see a lot of my extended family once a year and I’m sure every time they saw me I had a new job or career direction, probably because I did. Finding your calling or something you’re passionate about, that you can see yourself doing for the foreseeable future is quite a big commitment and one I was certainly having a hard time with. The advice I received that stayed with me was the ability to see the good and purpose in everything that you do. It’s easy to see where you want to be, but what is most helpful is to understand the skills you gain from your current situation. Everything that you do, whether it’s a part-time job, being a teammate on a team, or just volunteering your time, all of it has a purpose that will help shape you as a person — and potentially your future. It’s easy to see where you want to be, but what is most helpful is to understand the skills you gain from your current situation. What I personally took from this tidbit of advice is that life is a journey and so is my professional career. The jobs that I liked the least and thought would serve me no purpose all taught me valuable tools and took me one step closer to my overall goals. Being here at Vox Media, I’ve gotten the chance to actualize so many of my professional goals because of the skills I gained from past experiences — and some of those jobs at the time I without a doubt thought served no purpose and didn’t align with my professional aspirations. Although that is the point, everything has a purpose. Your career is full of twists and turns and ups and downs but remember along the entire way what your goals are, and remember all the moments along the way are helping pave the way to your ultimate professional greatness. CHRISTOR JENKINS, 2012 GRADUATE Creative Strategist A few weeks ago, I was playing the game Hot Seat and was asked a deceptively difficult question. “If you could go back in time four years ago and tell yourself one thing, what would it be?” Vague, get-rich-quick answers popped into my head: Powerball, Bitcoin, March Madness brackets. Predictable. Then a voice came in loud and clear. “I would tell myself, ‘You are good enough.’” It’s important to remember that not only are you good enough, but you may very well be the most qualified and insightful voice in the room. In the first few weeks at my first job, I scheduled some ads in Adwords to fire at the wrong time and an entire campaign was down for half the day. The second half of the day was spent on client calls explaining how it happened and why it would never happen again. At that point, it was the worst day of my career. The difference between “&” and “and” made me fear that I was inadequate and inept. That fear is magnified when you’re young and a minority, because whether real or perceived, we often feel the burden of being exceptional. And in the embarrassing learning moments, when self-doubt grows but confidence shrinks, it’s important to remember that you are indeed good enough. As you gain experience and responsibility, you’ll find yourself in new rooms, with important people, having big conversations. It can be easy to lose your voice. Navigating rooms with big personalities and politics, while also wanting to feel like you can contribute, is difficult. Internal doubts can keep you quiet. On those days it’s important to remember that not only are you good enough, but you may very well be the most qualified and insightful voice in the room. This is a fast, challenging, but always interesting industry. A lot will go wrong. There will be blowups and hard conversations. On those days and in those moments, it’s important ALIYA KARIM, 2012 GRADUATE Video Writer, Explainer Studio I joined Vox