Gina Abitante spoke to a group of students from the Tombras School of Advertising and Public Relations during their January 2025 visit to New York City.
In Gina Abitante’s (‘23) line of work, one social media influencer posting a video praising a shampoo can put her workday into overdrive. As an account executive at Marina Maher Communications, overseeing user-generated content that promotes a range of her clients’ beauty products, Abitante finds a multitude of ways to get influencers to push those products to the forefront of social media conversations.
“I spend a lot of my time doing community management—commenting and DM’ing and talking to consumers and influencers to hopefully get social re-share. Looking at how to get products in-hand and consumer sentiment of those products to go up without spending thousands of dollars and paying people to say they like the products,” she said. “A lot of admin work as well, like agenda keeping, notetaking. You have earned media, corporate leadership, content creation people, and they all know what they’re supposed to be doing, and my role is to mainstream that work seamlessly and ensure we meet our deliverables.”
The College of Communication and Information alumnus works at the New York City-based MMC—a marketing and communications agency—and she’s thriving in the fast-paced environment. Every day is different as she manages a “hodge podge of a million parts” to promote the products and brands in her portfolio. The work plays into her strengths as a planner, and she credits majoring in communication studies with giving her a great start in the field.
“I think the School of Communication Studies and major sets you up for any field you want to go into. It’s not just learning how to speak to others, but one of the most important things I learned was listening to understand and not listening to respond. It’s helped me in my career but also in personal relationships with family and friends,” she said.
She also took courses in advertising and public relations, journalism and media, and professional development, which Abitante said each gave her a different perspective and set of skills that she utilizes at her job.
“Because I took so many classes that were a wide range, they did really prepare me for anything. I took a few PR classes where I had RFPs and press releases in front of me, and just knowing the lingo and having a good understanding of that upped my confidence a lot and made me feel like I was on a more equal playing field as the people I was speaking to because I knew what was going on. And the professional development classes helped me acquire the job, and the advertising classes I took helped me understand the people we work with, and journalism has helped me learn about different news outlets and get a better understanding of where they’re coming from,” she explained.
It was in one of her required courses where Abitante was given an assignment that would be the first step of many she took that resulted in landing an interview for her current role. She had to make a LinkedIn profile for the course, which prompted her and some friends to make a lofty goal to get 500 connections on the site every night for a month. They sent invitations to everyone they knew from fellow students and friends from high school to friends of their parents.
“That got me into looking into public relations and I had friends from home interested in PR, especially in the New York metropolitan area, where I wanted to move back to. And they said internships and fellowships are very common in public relations, especially if you want to go agency instead of in-house,” Abitante said.
One of the agencies she’d heard positive reviews about was MMC, so she applied and knew just from the application that it was a place she’d enjoy working. Unlike standard applications, it focused on the applicant’s creativity and allowed her to highlight her passions and what she enjoyed doing. She got the interview and the job and has been progressing upwards for the past two years, moving from working for just one brand, Head & Shoulders, to five different brands under Procter and Gamble.
There are exciting moments in her job, such as the one where beauty influencer Alix Earle created and shared a video two days before Christmas about how the Pantene shampoo at her parents’ house made her hair feel better than the expensive luxury brands she’d tried. That one video set off a domino effect that the CCI alumnus, and her colleagues, were responsible for managing, as Pantene is one of the agencies brands. She quickly began contacting past partners who had tried the brand to help keep the momentum of Earle’s video going.
“Ultimately there was 200-plus pieces of organic content made as a result of Earle,” Abitante said.
It’s been fulfilling for her to find such success early in her career, and she was especially excited to share that with students on the Tombras School of Advertising and Public Relations trip to New York earlier this year. She wanted to show them how they can use what they learn in their courses, along with good networking, to achieve their goals. As for her, she only sees good things for the future of her career.
“I am really happy at MMC, and I definitely can see myself growing here more, and as new business gets acquired and we expand more, I’d love to work on more outside this realm of beauty and haircare and gain as much experience as possible. I think that the background I have from almost two years has primed me well to advance,” she said.