Her Story
About Marlena
I started my career path somewhat unexpectedly. I originally went to college as an English major, then switched to mass communications with a concentration in broadcasting because I really wanted to be a news anchor. After moving to New York City, I couldn't find a job in news that would afford me the lifestyle of living there, so I started working as a recruiter at a job placement agency. One of the companies we worked for was an advertising agency, and since I had production experience from my undergrad work at the TV Center where I produced and was the lead news anchor, I started working for that client as an assistant in production. I worked closely with the producers with hopes of being promoted, and I've been in advertising production ever since. What really drew me to this work was discovering that producers are problem solvers, and I'm a natural problem solver. I love the idea that when someone needs an answer for something, it's my job to figure out what the answer is, to know who the right people are, and to help accomplish what they're trying to accomplish. My responsibilities include managing budgets and schedules, responding to creative direction and needs, facilitating the hiring of directors, talent, and locations, and running the day-to-day operations of production leading up to filming, during filming, and through post-production editing. I've worked on everything from healthcare to restaurant work to organizations like the American Cancer Society. What I'm most proud of is the breadth of my work and my capability to work across different clients, some fun and sales-related, and some really human interest stuff for pharmaceutical or donation-based organizations. That's the more rewarding work. My biggest achievement is the ability to flex between brands and really important work, and also just really easy, fun work.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Marlena
01What do you attribute your success to?
I think it's really just a lot of my adaptability. The way that I grew up, I grew up in a large family with a lot of different personalities, and I've always just been really curious. That's helpful because you do research when you're curious, and a lot of what a producer does is research. My success also comes from really understanding people. This is a very people-first kind of business, and you have to understand how to connect with not just the people that you work with, but your clients, and also the people that you're trying to reach when you're producing an advertisement. When there's a message that you're trying to share, you have to understand what that audience is. So I think that's what's helped me a lot, knowing people.
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I think we're really up against budget. There's a lot of shrinking budgets. We're in a recession, the economy is not doing well, people aren't advertising as much because people aren't buying as much. So we're having to learn how to do more with less, less budget, less time. We're also up against some of the challenges of AI and people trying to find what they consider to be more efficient ways to do things that may or may not be efficient, but certainly are, in the long run, making it difficult for certain roles. It's harder now to be a creative. It's a little bit harder now to be a producer because there are people that feel like they have a solution that doesn't require human hands. A lot of the challenges come down to the fact that we just don't have the same kind of money and time that we used to have when I started in the field almost 20 years ago.
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