UCA Spotlight: Kelly Ho at CBS Interactive

Introducing Kelly Ho, a former UCA board member and UCLA class of 2016 alumna! She’s currently the Associate Marketing Manager at CBS Interactive. 

Please describe your career path from UCLA to your current role.

At UCLA, I did a couple of internships. At first, I was an Editorial Intern at HK Magazine. It no longer exists, but it’s an English speaking magazine in Hong Kong. After that, I did a stint at a non-profit called Dress for Success. I also did a couple of internships at entertainment companies like Live Nation and Paramount. For my final internship during my senior year, I was the partner marketing intern at Nickelodeon. I got to help create decks and pitch marketing ideas for different movie and video game promotions on Nickelodeon sites. That was a really exciting time. As for UCA, I did it for two or three years of my college career and that was really fun and educational. It really helped me explore my career path. After I graduated from UCLA, I started off as an assistant media planner at  a media agency called Initiative. There, I was on the Dr. Pepper account. That's where I learned advertising fundamentals - I got to learn more about media buying, what kinds of different platforms we want to bring our ads to, whether it's digital or TV out of home, or print. After a few months on Dr. Pepper, I transferred on to the Amazon account as a media planner. That was one, a promotion and two, you got to work on really big things like Prime Day and the Super Bowl. We did the Cardi B spot a few years ago and that was a lot of fun. After a year at a media agency, I was like okay, I'm ready to go in-house, so I joined CBS interactive as an associate campaign manager. So right now I do a lot of media buying for different platforms like cnet.com, TV Guide, ETonline and just promote our content. 

What helped you to navigate through all these different roles? 

Mentors are definitely super helpful. It always helps to have someone with at least three years of extra career experience on you to guide you through different things. I know transitioning from being a senior at UCLA to an assistant media planner was actually pretty tough just because the post-grad environment is totally different; you're out of your college bubble. There's a lot that you have to navigate and figure out in terms of people relations and how to prove yourself and your work ethic. I think mentorship is really important because some really nice people helped me out whenever I got stuck or had career-related questions. Another thing would be a strong work ethic, so volunteering yourself for new opportunities to learn, checking in with your boss just to make sure you're on the same page. I think those would be the main points. 

How do you approach checking-in with your boss? 

Yeah, so I definitely struggled with that at first. I didn't want to come off as incompetent if I asked a few extra questions. I think what really helps is first, you gotta kind of figure out what your boss's personality is like. If they’re a little more impatient I think you have to tread a little more carefully. If they're patient, they're open to questions, I would say just observe and see what their workload looks like. Are they really frantic right now? Are they calm? Then wait for that right moment to approach them. Also, it really helps, if you don't want to bother your boss too much, I would say accumulate your questions, especially if they're not urgent, and then pick one specific point at the day to ask all of those out. I think they would appreciate your proactiveness and not find you intrusive.

How did UCA impact your college experience? 

UCA was super helpful just for me to understand as a comm major what my potential career paths were after college. During my college years, UCA helped me with networking, even networking with people within the comm major. Being able to put on events and invite professionals from the entertainment or tech industry to come in, you have more one-on-one time and exposure. Even within the UCA board, we shared a lot of advice with each other and internship opportunities. I think that was just a really good kind of professional sounding board, especially when we were job hunting as seniors. There was a lot of camaraderie and everyone's super helpful, but definitely exposure to professionals and different opportunities was really, really helpful. 

What inspired you to choose this career path? 

I wanted to go into entertainment at first and I was actually applying for a coordinator position with Nickelodeon. When they went with someone with one year of agency experience, that was when I was like, “oh, what's an agency like?” I hadn't really considered that career path so I  looked more into it. What really attracted me to an agency as a starting point for a fresh grad is that you basically learn a lot in a short amount of time – meaning your work-life balance is compromised, but you get exposure to all these different clients, different accounts. You get to manage multimillion-dollar budgets for different advertising campaigns. With that kind of exposure, I knew I was going to learn a lot more from it than if I went directly into a junior role at a massive company because I just wouldn't have as much exposure to the bigger picture. A lot of people tend to do one or two years of agency experience before trying to move in-house, which is what I did. 

So what does your day-to-day look like now as an associate marketing manager? 

Right now, I do a lot of campaign management, so I basically buy ads on different ad platforms  and help drive traffic from those platforms to our different sites like ETonline, CBS News, cnet.com. Our goal is to get audiences to our sites and view our monetized content. So my day-to-day starts off with reporting for us to pull the data and see how many people clicked on our ads, and then how many people visit our site. Then I'll upload any new ads that we have. We have an internal content team that I liaise with and then I launch those ads on to our different platforms. After that I make optimizations, I have a really fancy report that I look at to kind of categorize our ads and see which ones perform better than others, and then I'll adjust the bids accordingly. So the bids are basically how much we pay Facebook to show our ad. After that, we also communicate with our vendors, so our different sales reps at these different platforms, and then we figure out, is there like a new advertising product that we can use to show our different assets? Or is there something we can try to get more traffic? So it's a lot of communication and being comfortable with data. 

What is your favorite part of the job? 

When I was a media planner at Initiative I got a lot of exposure to what the big picture strategy is. So what kind of target audiences do we want? Should we go with more digital or more TV ads for this particular campaign? What I really like about this current job is that we are able to get into the real nitty-gritty. I felt like the missing piece in my knowledge of advertising was the actual digital campaign execution. So on this job, I'm able to learn things like “what does a CTR mean for your campaign? What kind of ad performs better? Is it one with a picture of a certain celebrity on it or is it one with just a landscape picture on it?” So being able to make these data-backed decisions in marketing is super helpful. Also, another part of my job is I can very tangibly see how much money we’re earning through our ads. We have an internal data team that helps us synthesize our spend data with our revenue data, so I'm able to clearly understand the performance of my campaigns, which is pretty gratifying. I think with data, something I didn't know when I was in college, is that marketing isn't just coming up with concepts. Increasingly, a lot of marketing decisions are made based on data. You do have to be pretty comfortable with numbers in order to really thrive in the industry. Even if you go into more like big picture marketing roles, like brand marketing, you typically do have to kind of look at the metrics and see if your decision is justified and you have to do a lot of testing. That's something that I would encourage people to think about just because I barely considered that when I was in college.

What has been your greatest career challenge and how did you overcome it? 

I think my greatest career challenge was probably towards the end of my stint at the agency. I was having a little bit of a career identity crisis, like do I want to stay in the agency industry or do I want to move more in-house? Ultimately, I think something about the agency, I could learn a lot in a short amount of time, but at the same time, a lot of your work is client-driven. So whatever they need, you have to be really efficient and cater to them, but when you're working in-house, you get to take more of a lead on decision making and directions you're taking. So right now, if I want to test something, I can do that with some approval, but you're able to take more initiative, and you're able to determine what direction you want to take. That's something that I really appreciate because it teaches you to think in a more proactive way as opposed to reactive.

What advice would you give to UCA members who are interested in a career in marketing?

Marketing is such a big umbrella. You have brand marketing, publicity, audience acquisition marketing – which is kind of what I'm doing right now – and more . I would say, especially if you're still trying to figure out what you want to do, intern in different areas. So take one more data-intensive marketing role and then take one that's more PR related, just figure out what qualities of each job you can see yourself doing in the future. Also, I would say, especially as a college student, you can really benefit from reaching out to people on LinkedIn or anywhere even and just kind of seek their advice. Everyone wants to help out college students because everyone was once there, confused and lost. I would also say if you do internships, do it in different industries. I was pretty set on entertainment, but I do wish I explored more whether it was tech or the startup landscape, or even look into consulting a bit. Broaden your scope and if you’re set on entertainment, you live and breathe film, then maybe entertainment is the clear front runner for your desired industry. If you're still trying to figure out what you like, I would say don’t be too set on one thing, take the time to explore different sectors. 

Also, check out Kelly’s LinkedIn here!