My Time as an Intern for Brooklyn Made Presents

Internship Reflection

Spring 2024

By: Isabella Begazo

Next week I’ll be wrapping up my internship and learning experience at Brooklyn Made Presents as a live music marketing intern. Working as an intern for a concert promotion company and venue space, I gained valuable knowledge about the music industry and practical marketing strategies in digital media. Overall, this primarily remote experience was both useful and beneficial as I finish my college career, providing me insight into a career I view myself working in the future.

My day-to-day tasks changed as the semester progressed. At the beginning, I was mostly working on “Intern Daily Tasks.” All the interns were provided with a checklist of daily social media tasks, and the tasks were divided into different sections corresponding to the types of tasks, such as engagement, highlights, and posts. 

Some engagement posts included commenting on the posts of bands or artists that will be performing at Brooklyn Made, or responding to direct messages on Instagram. The highlights and posts sections referred to primarily Instagram publications. We used a website called Sprout to schedule posts up to three months ahead of time, including flyers for upcoming shows, venue rental space promotion, and more. One thing I found interesting was the strict timing of social media posts. We were only allowed to schedule social media posts across the different platforms at certain times; 10 a.m., 1 p.m., and 3 p.m. Also, if one post was made on the Instagram account, the same post had to be made on the Twitter and Facebook account. Alongside the daily intern tasks, I was mostly given small projects to get used to how the marketing team functioned.

Later on I started working on lengthier tasks and projects which became more interesting to me. One of my favorite projects I’ve worked on was a market research and competitor analysis spreadsheet, where I researched local music venues and analyzed their marketing strategies. I worked on this project over the course of my internship, researching venues whenever I was finished with my initial task and had some downtime to spare. 

I believe I gained the most valuable experience from this project, as it taught me what to look for when analyzing digital marketing strategies, and brainstorming strategies to implement on our platforms with a team of interns. But overall, I really enjoyed the dynamic aspect of the tasks and projects I was assigned. Near the last month of my internship, the majority of my time was spent working only on day-to-day projects rather than the regular daily tasks I did before. After checking-in I would be assigned a project to work on for the day, such as a promotional video for an upcoming performing band, or another video promoting a happy hour event for the venue’s bar. Or on another day, my task would be to research local radio stations to reach out for on-air promotion.

Part of the learning experience of an internship involves setbacks and obstacles to overcome. At first, I believed a social media-based internship would be a very straightforward and effortless position, but I’m glad my assumptions weren’t true. Little tasks that I thought would be easy would sometimes take more time than I had originally planned. 

I’m personally not too familiar with trends on TikTok, which is a platform that was used a lot for promotion of the venue. Coming up with ideas for TikToks and drafting them, as well as making sure they fit the guidelines the company set was more difficult than I had imagined, especially when you aren’t familiar with how to use the platform and what is popular on it. Over time I got used to how it works, as well as how to use TikTok video editing platforms such as CapCut and Canva, using videos filmed by other interns and myself of the venue space and live shows.

Music is one of my passions and hobbies, and I’m grateful I was able to get a good insight of how the live music industry functions; especially in a bustling city like New York, where music is rich and diverse. This internship, being my very first, has so far provided me with the most valuable experience, knowledge, and familiarity with real-world work experience.