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Knotch connected with Emmakate Young, Director of Brand Strategy and Marketing Communications at Delta for our "Own Your Voice" series to hear her story, and to learn what drives Emmakate in her career.
At a dinner party in Los Angeles when I was 12 years old. My aunt’s friend was a writer for the LA Times. He was so knowledgeable on very different topics from having written stories on them. I knew then that I wanted to be a storyteller so I could learn constantly for the rest of my life.
When I was 25, I quit my job to travel the world solo for six months and spent every dollar I’d ever had to my name (and then some). It was quite the leap, but completely worth it and I ended up working in Kenya for two years. I never anticipated how much I would learn about myself during that time, or how valuable the international experience would be to future employers. It was a personal pivot, but in the long run, did wonders professionally as well.
I’ve been incredibly blessed to have many amazing people impact my story. It’s hard to pick one person, but a mentor Mark Weintraub once convinced me that I would enjoy advertising. I was a journalist by degree, so advertising was a dirty word to me at the time. But he helped me see that telling clients’ stories and learning their businesses was another way to continue learning, telling stories, and getting more into the business behind it all. I was immediately hooked (Thank you, Mark!).
If you have some really powerful content, don’t move away from it too quickly. Marketers/advertisers often forget that just because we’ve seen it non-stop, doesn’t mean our audiences have seen it (or even digested it). Let it sit a bit longer.
I have to go with the sentence I’ve lived by since my 25th birthday; from Anais Nin: “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
