Aloha from National Geographic
By Dean’s Intern Meaghan Crociata at National Geographic
Did you know that “aloha” in Hawaiian means “hello” AND “goodbye”? As the semester comes to a close, I wanted to give my last aloha to National Geographic Channel and reflect on my time as an intern. Interning for National Geographic Channel has taught me so much about the entertainment industry, the different avenues of marketing and communications and most importantly, giving me insight about my choice of career.
I have enjoyed coming to my internship each day, ready to work with shows and brands that require customization, research and creativity in order to create the perfect, mutually beneficial partnership. Since my last blog post, I have written vignette pitches, researched various industries and brands for our newest in-production shows to potentially partner with, assisted in the development of bigger client’s advertisements and contributed to the research and creation of an awesome deck for the second season of Empire. (If you haven’t watched the show, do it right after you finish reading my post. I’m obsessed.) In addition, I presented my intern project that I have been working on all semester to my team of ad sales leaders. This project is a social media competitor tracker, in which I have researched partnerships between competitor networks and big brands in order to for NGC to stay ahead of the competition. Scouring Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, I have created a deck that showcases the integrated partnerships with brands from every industry. In addition, my presentation also included a section about innovations in social media and how brands could partner with content producers on platforms such as Snapchat Discover.
Before coming into this internship, I hadn’t considered ad sales and partnerships to be such an integral role in the overall marketing world, but this department can somehow be tied into every other part of marketing. In reality, advertising and partnerships are necessary for the channel to generate revenue and fuel our shows!
As a student pursuing a degree in sports and entertainment marketing with a communications minor, I have many fields that I can choose to go into ranging from professional sports to film to public relations. However, after this internship, I know that my true passion is television and working for a network is my new career goal as I enter the exciting/frightening working world in just a few weeks. I have learned so much about advertising, partnerships and branding, entertainment, television and myself while at National Geographic Channel and I couldn’t think of a better experience to have during my last semester at AU. Aloha Nat Geo, and mahalo (thank you) for everything!