Good morning. To many of us, the tech world seems like a compsci kids only club. And while that’s sort of true sometimes, the reality is that they need us marketing folks too. Where would Apple be without their “1984” commercial? The whole world would still be rocking Blackberry’s.

Find out how Sam Lonac scored a marketing internship with a tech company, what he does in that role, and what he thinks you should do to earn one too.

—Sean Sebers

In today's edition:

🏆 What earned him the role?

📚 The Res.

📊 What he does

📈 Give us more!

Sam Lonac

Marketing Intern

Sam Lonac grew up in Campbell, California before moving to San Luis Obispo to attend California Polytechnic State University. He’ll be graduating this spring with a bachelor’s degree in business administration and a concentration in marketing. His academic career is far from being over, though. Come next fall, Sam will start a master’s program at Cal Poly in business analytics. Best of luck, Sam.

In his free time, he likes to cook, garden (in the summer), and make music if he’s with his old highschool homies. Like every human on earth, Sam’s guilty pleasure is watching too much YouTube, but he decided to change his ways and delete the app the day of our interview.

As for his internship, Sam scored a marketing intern role with a company called iPromote back in November of 2022. Primarily, iPromote makes money by selling its own software to advertising agencies and other companies. Basically, as advertising agencies manage more campaigns, they spend more time going back and forth with businesses about the style and messaging of their ads before they can launch their advertisements. iPromote’s software is able to solve this problem by automating the campaign creation process, allowing for advertising agencies to create an ad campaign in front of their clients and adjust it as needed. This streamlines the creation process from weeks to minutes, and allows for edits to be made on the fly rather than having to take down and restart campaigns. If you’re interested in learning more about iPromote and what they do, click here.

What earned him the role @iPromote?

Sam found his marketing internship at iPromote through Cal Poly’s marketing association.

• The American Marketing Association (AMA) is an organization for marketing professionals, but they also have 250 collegiate chapters in the US.

• There’s usually no barrier to entry, so check with your school to see if you have a marketing association chapter you can join.

After attending the first meeting, Sam realized he wouldn’t be able to join AMA because of a schedule conflict. Instead of cutting ties with the group, Sam stayed connected by joining their GroupMe chat.

Apparently this chat was blowing up with internship opportunities, because Sam was able to find his internship with iPromote shortly after joining the GroupMe.

Experience helps

Sam still had to apply like everyone else, but there were some specific things that made his application really successful.

For starters, Sam applied early. Like, really early. As soon as Sam’s phone lit up with a GroupMe notification, he opened the message and sent out his resume to iPromote.

Sam’s prior experience as a management intern for a music company, and as an assistant manager for a local ice cream shop gave credibility to his work history. The most significant piece of his resume, however, was his experience working for Cal Poly’s student run media organization called Mustang Media Group (MMG). While at MMG, Sam’s focus has been on advertising. That includes everything from connecting advertisers to MMG’s publication to creating ads for clients. To put it simply, local businesses want to advertise in Cal Poly’s publication, and they need a point of contact who can work with them to do that.

Since iPromote is heavily involved in the advertisement and sales industry, Sam’s role at MMG really stood out. Having experience that aligned directly with iPromote’s job description definitely scored him a call from HR.

At one of Sam’s in-person interviews, his interviewer was testing his level of knowledge in the advertising space by asking how much he knew about different industry terms. Sam admitted that he only knew around 20% of what was asked, but his honesty carried him through and landed him the job.

📚 The Res.

What a marketing intern @iPromote does:

For a part-time intern, Sam does a lot. At the beginning of his internship, a bulk of his time was spent learning about the industry from his boss and other employees on the marketing team. Of course, he’ll always be learning as an intern, but his role now encompasses working on iPromote campaigns, technical writing sheets, and social media.

Campaigns

To fully understand how Sam contributes to campaigns, you have to understand iPromote’s product and audience. In a super condensed nutshell, iPromote’s product is a set of software tools that helps companies to advertise their own products/services more effectively. This begs the question, which companies would want to use these tools the most? Advertising agencies. Ad agencies win their bread by promoting products/services, the exact reason why iPromote’s technology is perfect for them.

iPromote is currently using their advertising technology to advertise themselves, and Sam is writing taglines and copy for those display ads. The biggest challenge is finding ways to pack an enticing message into only a few words.

• Display ads are advertisements usually placed on the margins or footers/headers of blogs, articles, and other websites.

When we last spoke, Sam was working on eight different taglines that were all targeted toward different audiences (aka clients). iPromote encourages the use of AI, so when ChatGPT isn’t giving cryptic sentient answers, Sam uses it as a learning tool.

Technical Writing

Another part of Sam’s role is making one-page technical documents that explain different iPromote products in a way that most people can understand. Once completed, these pages are used by iPromote’s sales team to explain their products simply to clients.

This kind of a project requires a ton of knowledge on iPromote’s offerings and even knowledge about this industry. Sam has to communicate complex software using terms that are common among advertising professionals. In other words, this isn’t your average “make a post and respond to two classmates” kind of assignment.

Fortunately, Sam can ask for help and guidance whenever he needs, and all of his writing is reviewed before going live.

Social Media

As far as social media goes, Sam was just starting to explore that area of marketing. At the time of our interview, he was being introduced to Hootsuite which is a popular social media management and planning platform.

If you’re interested in learning more from or connecting with Sam, feel free to reach out to him through LinkedIn here, or watch his interview here!

📈Give Us More!

💼Want to hear more from Sam?

• Watch the full interview on our YouTube channel linked here.

🔍Connect with Sam!

• Connect with her on LinkedIn here.

📢Advice from Sam:

I think that if you can find a path for yourself, whether it's through job experience or joining a club, building up some sort of experience on a resume to show you can work with different companies/groups is important. Make the most of your time in college because people cut you a lot of slack while you learn and grow during your professional development. Companies are investing in you, and they don't expect you to know anything. Of course they expect you to be somewhat knowledgeable in the area you’re applying for, but they also want a relatively blank slate for them to be able to develop you in the way that they need for their role.

I think that going into a role with a learning mindset is probably the most important thing to have, but also not discounting what you have. You might not have an internship at the most massive company ever. At my first internship, it was just me and the guy who started the company, but I learned a ton from that experience. So if you can do anything that develops your skills and is relevant to what you want to do, then go with that. You don't just have to apply for the “big dog” companies. —Sam Lonac

*Edited for clarity*