Newhouse Speaks #2: Viacom's Allison Rube

This evening, Allison Rube, senior manager of brand partnerships, at Viacom visited Newhouse to discuss her career path and what her current position entails. Rube started off by sharing her initial position at Viacom, which was in the advertising sales department. She noted that half of MTV’s revenue comes from advertising, stressing the importance of this department and how it greatly contributes to MTV’s profits. The process of advertising sales begins with a client. The next step in this process is the client giving money to a planning group. This planning group then reaches out to networks to further determine how to best hit the client’s goals with the money available. This process directly correlates to what I’m currently learning because it emphasizes the importance of creating a target persona. To spend the client’s money effectively, the network must pinpoint the demographics of its audience, such as age and gender. The network must also determine psychographics such as spending patterns. Creating a target persona is a necessary step in the public relations industry to best connect with a client’s publics.

Rube also touched upon storytelling, an area of the PR industry that will always be present. Storytelling is needed in public relations to share details with the public. For instance, promoting a client’s new product will only be effective when the story behind the product is shared with the public as well, to get in touch with the audience. In regards to Rube’s career, storytelling is important because it can provide further explanation for analytics Viacom receives about certain campaigns. For instance, if a campaign is not doing well, the best way to understand why this is the outcome, is to determine the story that Viacom was presenting to the public. After determining this, it is easier to understand why or why not something either worked well with the public or did not.

Ethics within social media is another way that class material has paralleled with the public relations industry. Students learn early on about the PRSA Code of Ethics guidelines, but it is more effective to see these guidelines come into play in the industry to understand the significance of them. For instance, in the past, Viacom’s social media guidelines and advertising policies included that alcohol sponsors were never accepted. This was an essential guideline, and if broken, was unethical because Viacom has networks that target teenagers and families. In recent years, this specific policy was changed because Viacom realized how much revenue was being missed. To somewhat keep this guideline, Viacom concluded that alcohol sponsors could be accepted, but only at specific time slots during specific shows.

Rube also discussed how quickly aspects of her job change. For instance, the show, “The Hills: New Beginnings” was set to premiere earlier in the year, but ended up debuting on television this past summer. Thus, Viacom had to quickly come up with solutions to keep the current sponsors, but adapt them to make sense in the new time frame that the show was premiering at. This is an aspect of brand partnerships that interests me because creating organic content is crucial during this era of social media. Creating organic partnerships that make sense, target the proper audience, and work cohesively in a show all while working in a fast-paced landscape incorporates so many aspects I am currently learning in PRL 215. #SUPRSSA