A Day as a Paramount Pictures National Publicity Intern
Hi UCA, my name is Vanessa Zhu, and I’m a rising junior majoring in Communication and Applied Linguistics and minoring in Digital Humanities. I just finished my summer internship with Paramount Pictures as the National Publicity Intern. Besides the internship, I’m also volunteering at a LA-based nonprofit organization called Chinese in Entertainment. Looking forward, I’m still exploring more opportunities in entertainment and tech industries and would like to share with you some of my experiences.
A day as a National Publicity Intern
Because of COVID, my internship was unfortunately shifted to a virtual program. Although I did not get a chance to help with premieres or field campaigns, I worked on a few projects that deepened my understanding of this job. One of my projects is to research, collect, and organize information of press contacts. It might sound tedious, but I think the media list is the first step to get to know the field. Through researching, I was able to familiarize myself with all kinds of media outlets and by asking questions, got to know how the team usually works with press. Accompanying this project, every week I picked an outlet and did in-depth research on its audience and how it covers talents and film titles. This project therefore encourages me to pay more attention to film coverage (materials they use, language styles, etc.) when browsing media platforms.
As an intern, another major part of my job is to participate in future campaign brainstorming. Since film publicity includes both media relations and talent relations, I helped with researching the breaks and talent activities of similar films – usually referred to as “comp”. For example, when brainstorming campaign ideas for the upcoming film Infinite, I researched a recent action film, especially the outlets it used, the talent interviews, when and where it launched the trailers, and its reviews.
In general, the work of publicity is really flexible, sometimes largely depending on who you have better relationships with. Some publicists deal with talents more often and others focus on media outlets. Through this internship, I realized that I am more interested in working with press than talents, which is also something I’ll spend more time to figure out.
My Career Path
When I entered UCLA, I had no idea of which industry I wanna be in, but I knew that I’m interested in marketing and PR in general. With this idea in mind, I started my first college internship working for an influencer. Because of this experience, I was more confident when applying for the summer internship at a fin-tech company called Flywire in my freshman year. I was able to learn many aspects of marketing, from digital to field, during my time at Flywire. However, it was not until my volunteer experience at a local film festival that inspired me to look into publicity. I helped with media and partner outreach for the film festival and drafted the press release with another professional. This experience largely enriched my knowledge of entertainment PR and helped me a lot during my future interviews.
Paramount is actually my first studio internship, so I didn’t have any connection prior to this job. I applied online and went through all the application process; to be honest, I was worried about having no connections or referrals, but it turned out that online applications still worked. Many said that you need to “show your passion”, but how? When reflecting on my final-round interview, I personally focused on the transferrable skills that can be applied to PR and my understanding of film publicity, which I learnt not only from my past experience but also from many articles I once read. So if you don’t have an ideal internship for now, there are many resources you can explore to gain insights into the industry.
Looking back, one of the biggest takeaways is that there is no set path to a certain position. I never thought that my volunteer experience could help me identify my passion and even land an internship. I still keep reminding myself to learn as many as possible from every experience because you won’t know if one of them can bring you unexpected opportunities and help you achieve your dream in the future.
PS: If you’re also interested in film or tech PR/Marketing, feel free to connect with me on Linkedin.