Right after graduating university, I spent a long weekend in Cornwall. Adam Curtis’ Can’t Get You Out of My Head had just come out and I spent much of the 3-hour drive talking to my friend in the passenger seat about it (he’s also a history graduate and irredeemable dork). The conversation eventually sprawled its way onto The Century of the Self, one of Curtis’ earlier docuseries, which is partly about Edward Bernays, the “father of public relations.”
“What the corporations realised they had to do was transform the way the majority of Americans thought,” narrates Curtis in a sequence set to moody black and white helicopter shots while ambient music drones threateningly. This was my introduction to the field of public relations — if Mr Curtis is to be believed, then PR is an industry of nefarious, evil geniuses.
Fast-forward a couple of years and when entering the industry, I found that the evil geniuses at Hoffman all seemed to take their cues from Hank Scorpio.
For the uninitiated, Hank Scorpio is a character from a Simpsons episode from 1996. He is a supervillain with an evil plan to fire a satellite laser at the UN. Homer briefly works for Mr Scorpio, and the gag is that despite being a dastardly villain, he’s also the ideal boss: personable, clearly cares about his employees, and is invested in their development (plus, he leads regular fun runs.) At Hoffman, I found a whole office of Hank Scorpios, who were warm and supportive and helped me succeed. That’s where the similarities end, by the way — no evil plans.
The London team is a close community, and I loved this because it meant I got to know everyone right from the go. They also got to know me as an intern and as a person — I was quickly on accounts with everyone in the office. They say it takes a village to raise a child, and I really did feel like the whole office was on hand to support me as I got up to speed on the new job, with my line manager there to help more directly.
As an intern, I was encouraged to make mistakes, and those (inevitable) mistakes became part of my learning. I was told that “someone not making mistakes is someone hiding them.” This is great advice for anyone starting something new, I think. If I were to give some advice of my own about starting in PR, I’d encourage you to get excited about your clients and the externalities of what they do — it’s the most fun way to tell their stories.
One of my favourite tasks during my internship was a client tone of voice workshop, in which the account team riffed for almost an hour: coming up with the language and sentiment that best signalled the client’s brand identity for comms. I also had a lot of fun learning about technologies that were totally new to me while helping with media briefings at major tech conferences.
But honestly, I find it difficult to identify specific parts of this internship that stood out as particularly engaging or useful, because practically every bit represents a small piece of the interconnected whole that made up this internship. Everything I learned and accomplished had a relationship with the rest, and that’s what made it such a valuable learning experience. As it all comes to an end, I’m grateful for the time I spent with the Hoffman evil geniuses. I got to meet new people and try new things, get things wrong so I could get them right, and learn that PR is a fun place to be with a lot of great people — not the murky locus of villainy described by Adam Curtis!
