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liz

An Anthropological Approach to Branded Content

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,

May 29, 2018
diane

How My Liberal Arts Degree Led to My Career in Advertising

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

May 29, 2018