Do you ever wonder what it would be like to work for one of the biggest Public Relations Agency’s in the world? Senior Strategic Communications major, Elizabeth (Liz) Frattarole, from Hershey, PA tells us all about her dream-like summer in one of New York City’s most impressive areas – Manhattan.
What an exciting summer you had! Can you tell us a little about where you interned?
I worked for a public relations agency called MSLGROUP. It is the number six PR agency in the world. I was based in their New York office, which is the North American headquarters. I want to say they have about nine offices across major cities in North America, and then they have a world headquarters located in London. To give an idea of some of the campaigns they lead. The brand Always which is under one of MSLGROUPS biggest clients, Proctor and Gamble, released a really successful campaign called #likeagirl. MSLGROUP is still heavily involved in monitoring this campaign.
How did you hear about this internship?
I found it on LinkedIn actually! I literally typed in Public Relations internships and spent a whole day writing down different internships that I had found. I knew I wanted a big city, and I wanted something different.
What was the process of scoring this internship?
It was a pretty long process. I had to, oddly enough, create a Pinterest board about myself. Which I think was really cool because it showed a creative side. I had to answer three short essay questions about PR as an industry. I also had to submit a 30-second video about myself.
So what did you do for your video?
Mine was more interactive, I had a GoPro and I went around campus and tried to involve my day to day life as well as talking to people. I just kind of wanted to show them my normal life.
Did you apply anywhere other than New York?
I applied to San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. And I ended up hearing back from NY. In the beginning, that was not my first choice, that was kind of my last choice – I just picked it because it was closer to home. Once I heard back from NY, I was invited to attend a challenge day.
Can you explain what a challenge day is?
Yes, so they had 2,000 applicants for their New York location and they picked 30 to attend this challenge day. For my challenge day, I spent the day at their New York office doing interviews, I had to do a case study competition, and, in a group, I had to create a social media campaign for one of the agency’s clients. It was from 8 am to 5 pm and it was so cool. It was such a good experience and really foreshadowed the summer and the types of people I would be working with. From the 30 individuals at the challenge day, they picked 10 of us for the summer internship.
What were some of your main roles with the company?
I was assigned to the personal health care team, which was under its consumer department. I got to work with Proctor and Gamble and many of its individual brands including, Metamucil, Align Probiotic, Pepto-Bismol, Vicks DayQuil and NyQuil, then I worked a little bit with Prilosec OTC. I did a lot of media monitoring as well.
What exactly is media monitoring?
Say Proctor and Gamble made a press release about a new Pepto-Bismol commercial that came out, I would use a software called Cision – which is a way to monitor how many outlets pick it up and what the media is saying about it. I had to do a lot of industry research and summaries on what the media is talking about and how consumers are reacting to things.
What were some of the best days at work? Coolest moments?
The first week I was there, we had a media event for Meta and the spokesperson for that was Michael Strahan. So I had to do something called a “run of show,” which means you go from the beginning to the end of the day and write timeframes of what is going on. They had me doing that right away, so the first week was really intense but it was so cool!
How did you know what to do the first week? Did they help you out?
I had three mentors throughout the whole thing and they were all assistant account executives. If you are hired out of college, you are considered an assistant account executive. And then I had a manager who was a VP of the entire team. She was the one who would give me more global tasks to work on. My assistant account executive mentors would give me daily tasks like monitoring and doing industry summaries.
Any other cool moments like your day with Michael Strahan?
Another really cool thing was I got to work with Netflix. Each year, there is an internship project and this year it was Netflix. We were split into two teams and we had to figure out how to engage the late majority, which is basically everyone that is not on Netflix. We got to sit in on Netflix client call brainstorms. We got to talk to the actually Netflix team to figure out what it wanted out of the campaign and what its clients wanted out of the campaign. I got to sit in on a PetSmart, Buick, and Mitsubishi brainstorms. These brainstorms included individuals such as the Senior Vice President of the company. It was surreal.
What was the physical office like?
The office was really cool. There were a lot of different break out spaces with couches and coffee and there were always donuts. There were also big meeting rooms – the main meeting office had like 40 seats and then a glass window that looked over the entire city.
After graduation, would you like to go back?
If I were to be offered a job post graduation with them I would definitely take it. But I also have an interest in living in London, where their headquarters is. I would really like to live abroad for a year.