Ed Brown, Director of Creative Services, Emmis Communications, St. Louis, Missouri
Emmis has had a long history of paying extra attention to its production departments and personnel. This is no better exemplified than at their 4-station cluster in St. Louis, where Ed Brown serves as their Director of Creative Services. We last visited with Ed way back in October of 1989 when he was the Creative Director for KSHE. He had already been on board for several years, and today Ed is one of the few that can boast tenure with one station of over 20 years. In this month’s RAP Interview, Ed catches us up with the past 15 years at the Emmis stations in St. Louis and offers some insights into the success they’ve had, amongst other areas, on the commercial side of things, where Ed’s creative talents are now focused almost exclusively. Be sure to check out Ed’s demo on this month’s RAP CD for a great sampling of his commercial work.
JV: Our last visit with you was in 1989, which was of course pre-consolidation. It’s unusual to find somebody who survived this era at one station, but also to find a station that hasn’t changed ownership in all that time.
Ed: Yes, KSHE was one of the first four stations that Emmis owned. They started in Indianapolis with WENS and then, I think, added Minneapolis after that, and then bought KSHE and what’s now Power in LA. Those were the first four stations in the Emmis cluster.
JV: What changes did consolidation bring to your situation there in St. Louis?
Ed: One of the things that happened was, of course, we lost a lot of close friends because we couldn’t keep everybody through that process. They were good people doing a great job. It was just a numbers thing, and I was fortunate in that regard that I was doing something that was still needed in the consolidation effort.
JV: How many stations in the Emmis St. Louis cluster today?
Ed: Today we have four, which are all in one facility here. We had five up until a few months ago when we sold off one, so we’re down to four stations now.
JV: KSHE is currently the number one rock station in town. I would imagine that’s probably been pretty consistent through the years.
Ed: Yeah, we’ve managed to stay on top in our area, and usually we’re number one with men 25-54 consistently. Every once in a while we slip. The beauty is what we did with consolidation. What it allowed us to do is build what we call a “rock wall.” We have the alternative station which takes everybody from, we say birth to 25 or 30 years old. Then we have KSHE which is more of a classic rock leaning station that does play some current material. That station will pick you up at 30 and take you up to say 49. And then we have K-Hits which is a classic hits station, and that’s a little bit mellower for the older rocker. That station picks you up at 45 and up. The music on that station is going to be for anybody who’s at least under 65.
JV: Back in ’89 you were the Creative Director for KSHE handing all the imaging and a good portion of the commercials. How have things changed?
Ed: Well, I altered the title a little bit to Director of Creative Services to more reflect what I do now because it’s a little broader with four stations and with me now doing the commercial side. Basically, I’ll pinch hit in imaging now, and I’ll help negotiate contracts for libraries, especially for KSHE. But I don’t do the imaging anymore. It seemed there were a lot more administrative duties once we got four stations. I found out I was spending more time trying to find things that fit different formats and that accommodated different people and keeping up with supplies and stuff like that. I’m talking to different syndicators and services out there plus dealing with the creative needs of the sales staffs for four stations – we have four separate sales staffs.
So, it took a lot of time to deal with all these things. Furthermore, I don’t know if Creative Director was a title that our corporate structure had in their official listing, so for budget coding purposes, I think Creative Services Director fit the bill better. It’s funny because I’ll talk to people at our other stations around the country, and everybody’s got a little bit different title, and they all mean something a little different, but we’re all doing the same job.
I oversee the commercial department completely and then get involved in whatever area is deemed necessary at the time, whether it’s budgetary or whatever for the imaging. But the image guys all work directly with their PDs. So really, their needs stem from the conversations they have with their PDs, and whenever possible, it’s much better for them to work that stuff out. Basically, at budget time I round up numbers. But even then, I go to those guys and talk about, “Well, what do you guys need? What do you want? Where are you going?” Because they know what they need. And then I focus on what we need from the commercial side to be able to do the best job we can do.
JV: How many people are handling the commercial production?
Ed: It takes three people on a daily basis. We have three full-time people. I have one person, Drew Johnson, who’s responsible for K-Hits and for our FM talk station. He does the commercial production for both of those stations. Then I have another guy, Jamie Lambert, who’s a young guy I just hired recently to do the commercial production for the Point. That’s what the Point needs. I sat down with the PD and it was decided when we first got the Point that they needed somebody who’s young, who’s in that lifestyle, someone who pops that music in their CD player on the way home from work and who likes to go see those bands and such. I love to do production for that station, but for me, when I do commercial production for that station it’s almost like I sit down and go, “OK. Now if I’m 25 years old, what do I want to do here? What kind of cool effects can I put on this or how edgy can I get with this copy?” But these other guys, they live it, they breathe it. They just think that way. So it was really important to get somebody and keep people in that position who understand the Point and its audience. I do the writing for the other three adult stations almost exclusively, and for the Point only if somebody brings something to me that needs some special attention. I also do all the stuff for our NTR Department and our Interactive Department.
JV: You mentioned imaging guys. Who’s doing the imaging for all four stations?
Ed: Each station has its own Imaging Director.
JV: Wow, that’s a well-staffed facility!
Ed: It really is. And these are all top guys. Rob Naughton images KSHE. Mike Doran images K-Hits, but Mike also is the host and board op for the Bob and Tom Show which is syndicated in the morning on KSHE. Mike does 6 A.M. to 9 A.M. with Bob and Tom and then images K-Hits the rest of the time he’s here. He’s here till about noon or sometimes a little later. Then Rob will come in at noon, because they use the same studio, and Rob images KSHE in the afternoon until he leaves in the evening. Rob also works from home where he has a studio set up.
And then the Point is imaged by Jeff Frisse, and Jeff’s been doing the Point for quite a while. He took over the Point imaging I think shortly after we bought it. He was imaging another station for us, started as an intern actually, and wound up helping out the Imaging Director as an intern and then became the Imaging Director when that guy left. And then there’s Jim Modglin who is imaging the talk station.
JV: Are any of these guys voicing the imaging as well, or are the station voices outsourced?
Ed: Rob voices promos on KSHE, but we have a voice for the sweepers. Jim voices some of the stuff on the talk station, but we have a voice guy for that, too. Jim also has his own company, and he does imaging for stations outside, and on those I believe he does the voice, too. And like I said, all these guys are great. You could take any one of these guys and say, “We’re going to put you in a five-station cluster, and you’re going to image three stations,” and they could do it and sound fabulous. They’ve all got great chops. The stuff they turn out is just fantastic. I’d put it up there with anything anybody’s doing right now. We’re just fortunate enough that at least Rick Balis, who’s our market Program Director, has always felt that each station needs its own image person to create its own identity. When we had five stations, Jim Modglin did image two stations, but that was more because he wanted to do that.
JV: You made the move from mostly imaging to just commercials now. Most production people might want to go the opposite way. Why did you make this transition?
Ed: When we took on the extra signals maybe four or five years ago, we needed to do some restructuring. We needed to do some consolidation in the commercial arena. But we needed to make it better. We needed to do a better job for the clients. We wanted to raise the overall quality and offer more support for the sales staff. I’m not a big proponent of salespeople writing copy.
When I first came to KSHE, the first week I was here, I sat down in a sales meeting and told the sales staff, “From today forward, you won’t write any more copy.” And that worked good for one station, but then of course, as we got other stations, their salespeople were used to writing and so, consequently, I wrote some, they wrote some. But typically, with a salesperson, that’s not what they do and their copy tends to be your typical radio ad copy: “Bob’s furniture is having a sale this weekend. It’s the biggest sale of the year at Bob’s furniture!” So right away you violate the first rule: you don’t lead the spot with the client name.
But anyway, that’s just salespeople jargon. They don’t know. They just take a bunch of information and put it all in what seems to be 60 seconds of copy and there it is; “Let’s put it on the air and we’re all good to go.” I really wanted to get away from that. I wanted to make our group of stations be more responsive in that regard and do a better job for the clients. I just felt that the way for us to maximize our revenue was to try to keep our clients happy, if possible make them happier than any place else that they would advertise, and have them coming back and spending more money. That had been successful for me in my own business of Innovative Productions, working with companies directly on the side and with some small agencies.
If you pay attention and work closely with the client and do a good job for them and help them increase their revenue, then chances are, most of the time, they’re going to turn around and spend a little more. And they get loyal to you because they feel like you’re partnering with them and you’re part of their success.
So that was the idea, to try to create a commercial department that partnered with the clients and contributed to their success, which today is called ROI – return on investment – and really help them get results so that it endears them to the company and makes them want to continue to advertise with us and spend more money the next year.
That was the goal. Then it was time to look at who we have here now. Who can we keep? Who has what strengths and who offers what? Basically, Drew Johnson was here as the Production Director already for K-Hits, and I had worked with Drew before. From a commercial standpoint, Drew’s very strong as a producer and a talent. He has a fabulous commercial read — very national. He also voice tracks the six to midnight shift on K-Hits. The beauty of having somebody of that caliber to do that stuff I thought was really exciting.
With the Point, we kept the person that was already in place. He’s since left but we had that end covered with somebody who could target that audience. Then it was just a matter of each of us concentrating on making sure that we’re taking care of those clients. I’m also a liaison for the sales staff, and I try to encourage the salespeople whenever possible to follow in our philosophy. So, when salespeople come in and say, “Hey. I need this at seven o’clock tonight. Please write something and produce it,” it’s like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Who’s getting served by this?”
Originally, I wanted to centralize everything. I didn’t want to have individuals responsible for different stations. I wanted us to all work as a team. But the team concept is just too hard to pull off when you have separate sales staffs and when you have different formats that have different requirements. It turned out that it was much easier and really more fair to these guys because you’re talking about people who were Production Directors, and now all of a sudden, in a team, they kind of lose that identity, and I didn’t want that to happen. So instead, we basically have Production Directors for each of the stations, and then I head up the department as the Creative Services Director.
JV: What’s the process when a salesman comes to you and says, “OK. I’ve got this client that wants this commercial. He wants to sell some widgets. What can you do for me?”
Ed: Basically, I get information. I don’t want to say I get as much information as possible; I try to get the pertinent information. One of the things I look for is the unique selling proposition. What does this person have that no one else has that’s selling widgets? I remember a few years ago, there were finance companies all over the place. Every other spot on the air was a finance company offering to refinance your home. When things were really good three years ago, they were popping up everywhere. Every guy that knew anything about finance was starting his own mortgage company.
And so it seemed like almost daily somebody else would come in, “Hey, listen. I got this mortgage guy who wants to advertise.” And I’d say, “OK, what makes him different than the other 12 that are on the air right now?” “Well, you know, they all really have the same rates. They all really have this and that.” I said, “So, what makes them different?” “Well....”
So you start trying to create something different. You start looking for things. I remember this one group — it was two guys in St. Charles, which is a suburb of St. Louis — and I’m trying to find what’s unique and I’m not getting any information from the salesperson that’s making them unique. Everything I’m being told is the same thing that everybody else is advertising. So I keep going, I’m probing, I’m probing, I’m probing, and finally the salesperson said, “Well, you know what? I’ll tell you this. These two guys, they’re huge. This one guy has to weigh 320 pounds and the other guy probably weighs 300.” I said, “You’re kidding me.” He says, “No.” I said, “Well, there it is. They’re the biggest guys in the mortgage business.” And that’s what I did. I created an ad and touted them as the biggest guys in the mortgage business, and we referenced their size, their human size.
But that’s the kind of thing you do. You just start looking. “What can I do to sell these guys?” Once I’ve pinpointed the basics of their business and the message that they need to get out, and that’s their unique selling position, then I try to figure out what might trigger the audience. What is it about their product or service that I can turn into a need, and how can I reach that person? How can I reach through the radio, tap them on the shoulder and get their attention, because we know that they’re driving down the highway or stuck in traffic not thinking about that client, product or service. They’re thinking about an argument they had that morning before they left the house with their teenager or something else.
There are so many things on our minds, and all of our thoughts are inward and they’re mostly directed at ourselves. We’re not driving to work everyday thinking, “What wonderful thing could I do for someone else today?” We’re all consumed with ourselves, so somehow that ad has to break through that and get your attention and then make you feel like you need that product or service because it’s a selfish thing. I’ve got to make you think that you need it. So I try to figure out some way to create that need, to get it to cut through and then deliver on that with the information in some kind of entertaining way that doesn’t sound like I’m pounding a commercial at you. I try to stay away from commercial speak. I try to stay away from making something sound like an ad if I can. That’s not always possible because clients get in the way.
JV: Yes, it’s sometimes difficult to convince a client what’s best for him when he’s footing the bill!
Ed: I can’t remember the exact phrase, but Dan O’Day had a great comment in one of his newsletters he sent out recently that was about when clients demand bad advertising or bad copy, and it’s true. That’s what happens sometimes. I’ll sit here and write something and say, “Oh boy. This is so well targeted. This is going to really do well for this guy.” Then the client comes back and changes it and you say, “Well, you can’t do that. If you change this, now you’ve changed everything.” It’s like building blocks. If you take a block out, the whole thing starts to fall down; and if you take out two blocks you’ve weakened it even more, and by the third or fourth one it just falls apart.
Clients don’t realize that those sentences aren’t interchangeable with something that comes to their mind. So, you get your copy back, and all of a sudden nothing makes sense anymore. It’s like, wait a minute, the sentence that was ahead of that was setting up the sentence that you took out. The sentence behind that was relating to that sentence that you took out. So basically, by pulling that one sentence out, you just made all three of these sentences no good, but you left two of them in. So now we have two sentences that don’t mean anything with a third sentence stuck in that doesn’t mean anything, and all of a sudden we’re not reaching out and tapping anyone on the shoulder. We’re just throwing words at people through the radio.
It’s great when I get clients that go, “You know what, you’re right. You’re the expert and I’m going to go with what you say.” I try to tell them, “It’s not that I’m some kind of genius or something. I’ve spent 30 years trying to learn this stuff. I’m still trying to learn it. I still go to seminars and read books.” I think I’m going to go to the Roy Williams short course this next year — anything I can go to or do or read that helps me learn how to better target that message, how to better cut through the clutter, how to better reach people, because we know that today people don’t listen the same as they did ten years ago. The same things don’t appeal to people that they did ten years ago. Today, to reach someone, it’s a lot harder because they’re a lot more callous. You can’t tell people something’s great, that it’s new and improved, or it’s the best thing that ever happened, because they’ve heard that too many times. That doesn’t work anymore, so now you have to figure out a new way to tell people that it’s the best thing that they’ve ever tried.
I get clients who want to say, “Well, we’re friendly. We’re helpful. We have knowledgeable salespeople.” And I say, “Well, if you don’t have these things, get out of business. I hope you do have a knowledgeable staff, and that’s a given. As a listener, you don’t need to tell me that because I assume you have that. If you don’t have it, I’m going to be ticked off. So let’s don’t tell people the obvious. These are the givens. Whether you have them or not, you have the best salespeople, you have the most knowledgeable staff, you have the best product. Everything that you have is what I expect from anybody in business today. I don’t expect to walk into a place and be met by someone who’s rude. When I am met by someone who’s rude, I’m offended by it. So don’t tell me you’re friendly because that tells me that I should expect everyone else to be rude.”
But I’m always trying to learn and that’s what I try to tell clients: “You do your business. You go into work every day and you know your business and you know how to make that widget. You know how to sell that widget. You know how to improve that widget. But my job isn’t to know how to make the widget. I don’t have to know anything about a widget. I don’t really even have to know how it works or what it does. But what I do need to know is how to get the consumer to buy your widget.”
JV: How does this philosophy apply to imaging?
Ed: It’s the same. Most of this stuff is the same stuff that I did when I was doing imaging. I always said KSHE was my most important client. Marketing, imaging… we all read the books from Ries and Trout and all that, and we all got heavily into the idea of marketing and that imaging was really just advertising for your radio station. I took what I was doing with commercials and applied it to the imaging of the radio station at the time. Today I’ve stepped back, but I sample our stations constantly, and maybe once or twice a year, if I hear something, I’ll make some notes and pass them along to our market PD. In some cases it might be something that we’ll make a little adjustment in with regards to the imaging.
Every once in a while we might forget that we should be marketing in our imaging. It’s easy, as an Imaging Director, to get lost in the bells and whistles. It’s easy to get lost in trying to impress your peers across the street. Sometimes in doing that we don’t do the best job of getting the message out to our audience. So every once in a while I’ll listen critically to our stations just for that purpose; to make sure that we’re doing that with our imaging as well as with our commercials, that we’re actually reaching out and tapping that listener and dealing with them on their level. And that’s harder to do with the adult stations. With the Point, those guys do a fabulous job because they live that life; they know how to reach that young person listening to the music. But I think for KSHE and K-Hits and even our talk station, it’s tough because the audience is so broad that sometimes there isn’t just one way to talk that reaches everybody.
JV: Tell us about your studios.
Ed: We’ve got three image rooms for four image guys, and then we have three commercial studios. We have a fourth production studio that is in the process of getting put together that we’re going to use for part-time commercial production and for show prep for a couple of our high-personality shows. Then we have one other room that we call the closet studio because it basically is about the size of a closet. It used to be used as a call-screener room for our talk station before we moved it into a different area. It’s used primarily by our interns and by our Public Affairs Director. He does his public affairs shows in there in the morning. Then in the afternoon we have an intern come in everyday doing production out of that studio.
We’re all using SAW+32 as our primary software except for the Point image guy who uses Pro Tools. He’s got a Mac. We inherited that with the Point and so we kept that system. When Emmis bought the first two stations to go with KSHE in the market, those two stations were using SAW and were really comfortable with it. So KSHE went ahead and adapted to it. This was back in ’92, and I was using the Korg SoundLink in imaging, and the commercial guy was still using analog machines. SAW was a great addition for him. So only one person had to get up to speed on SAW. Everybody else was already there, and it just stayed that way because everyone’s been comfortable with SAW, and we’ve never had any mass movement to get away from it. Some of the young guys, especially our young Point guys, have home studios as a lot of young guys do, and they’re all using Audition. In fact, the engineers went ahead and put it on one of the machines. The Point production machine has SAW but it also has Audition on it so that one or two people who like to use Audition can use it when they want to.
JV: How’s your company Innovative Productions doing?
Ed: It’s doing OK. It slowed down over the last few years primarily because I don’t have time anymore with my duties here. I find that I take new customers as they come to me as opposed to me looking for them. I still work with a few agencies here in town. I find that I’m also doing a lot of sound design work with my company. There’s a company here in town called Halloween Productions that started out doing haunted houses. They have evolved into doing different types of rides and attractions for theme parks, and they do them all over the world. So, whenever they come up with a new attraction, a lot of times they’ll come to me to do the sound design work for it, and I’ll also do the voices. For instance, there’s a Spider Man ride and an Incredible Hulk ride at Niagara Falls. I’m the voice of Spider Man and a couple of the villains. I got a few other people to do other voices, and then I did all the sound design work for the ride.
Tombstone, Arizona, Old Tombstone — they turned that into a walk-through attraction, and as you walk around the Tombstone ghost town, the ghost of Doc Holiday follows you around. You’re in the funeral parlor and Doc Holiday’s there telling you about that part of Tombstone, and then you move over to the saloon and he joins you there. I do the ghost of Doc Holiday and also created the sound design work for that. Halloween time is a big time because they have three or four haunted houses here in town, and I’ll do that sound design work as well. But those things are labor intensive, and so I don’t really have the time to do as much as I used to like to do with Innovative Productions.
JV: You’re doing some seminars as well, aren’t you?
Ed: On occasion I do go out and speak. I do it through the Missouri Broadcasters Association. The Missouri Broadcast Educators Association is sort of an offshoot of that, and we’ve partnered with them to help them. Once or twice a year I’ll go to some kind of convention setting where I’ll do something on copyrighting or effective advertising. And now I have a PowerPoint presentation that I’ve taken on the road that’s basically about effective advertising and effective copyrighting. But again, it’s not stuff that I’ve thought up on my own. It’s stuff that I’ve gleaned from a lot of different sources over the years. I’ll read something that somebody says and I’ll say, “That makes sense,” and I’ll use that until it either doesn’t make sense anymore or until I find something else that makes more sense.
One thing I’ll say in my seminars is this: I used to think that winning awards meant I was doing a good job. After 50+ production awards over the past 26 years, I can honestly say that some of my least effective spots were the biggest award winners. Effectiveness and award-winning have nothing to do with each other. Today, I am much prouder and more satisfied with a simple, effective ad that drives traffic like crazy, than one that wins every award the industry has to offer. Not to say a creative ad can’t be effective. Dick Orkin proves that every day. But for most of us, we get caught up in the creativity and totally lose sight of the effectiveness.
I always tell young writers and producers to look at your copy or listen to your final product and ask yourself — or a third party — “does this spot really sell anything?” I mean really sell? Does it drive traffic, make the phone ring or increase hits in a major way? If the answer is “yes,” you’re done. Turn out the light and go home feeling good. That’s the only award I need anymore. When the client tells you how great the spot worked, that’s your award — one that can actually put money in your pocket!
JV: You’ve been at one station for 21 years. How does a person do that?
Ed: I’ve got to tell you, I can’t imagine that this would’ve happened if I worked with any other company. Emmis is just one of those companies. I haven’t worked for Infinity and I haven’t worked for Clear Channel, but Emmis has this bottom-up philosophy of empowering the employee and encouraging participation and rewarding loyalty when possible. I say when possible because there are times when you have to let people go. We just sold a signal, and when we sold that signal, many of the people who were working at that radio station that doesn’t exist anymore wound up losing their jobs. We took who we could, but we couldn’t keep everybody. So, a certain number of salespeople and a certain number of air talent and support people wound up losing their jobs. But that’s not the typical Emmis. Emmis gave those people incredible severances because of that. That’s how Emmis is. It was like, “You know what? If we have to lose you, we want to make sure that you’re taken care of well for a significant period of time so that you can find something else.” In fact, we even tried to find those people jobs at other places. I know that our market manager will call other market managers and say, “Look, we’ve got these wonderful people. They’re great at what they do. We just don’t have a place for them anymore. If you have any opportunities….”
And so Emmis is just one of those places. I remember when I first came here, Jeff Smulyan said, “I would love to see the day when Emmis is retiring people,” because radio just doesn’t. At that time, back in ’84, people didn’t retire from radio. They went to sell shoes or something else because, unless you were maybe in sales, there weren’t that many old DJs, and there still aren’t, really. It was always deemed a young man’s business, and you went from market to market till you got to a place where you were making a decent living. Then you worked there until somebody younger and faster and better came along, and then you were out of work. But Emmis has sort of changed that, at least the way this company works.
So I’ve been able to be here this long because of the way Emmis thinks: “Well, you have something to offer and we want that expertise in our company. Instead of always having young people who’ve been in the business for four or five years doing it, we like having some people who have seasoning and who’ve been around and who have more experience to offer.” But the company also encourages you to keep growing. Every year in my review there’s a goals thing that’s involved with growing: “How do you want to continue to grow? What can we do for you that will help you continue to grow,” so that I’m not stagnating after 30 years in radio and saying, “Well, you know, I know it all. I’ve been there,” because that’s not true. In fact, I know less now than I knew before because things change so fast today that trying to keep up with it is a job. So anyway, I think the company’s been a lot of my longevity.
JV: What are your thoughts on the talent of tomorrow? Where are they? Who are they?
Ed: I’ve had probably 50 or 60 interns over the years, and I would say that a lot of those people are working in the business right now, very talented and doing pretty good. I feel like I was fortunate enough to be able to be one of their mentors coming along. Jude Corbett was one of my interns. I remember when he came along… a young guy. Obviously he really loved production and was just fascinated with it. He went out after the internship and got himself a job in, I think, Terre Haute, Indiana or some place like that and was doing nights there on the radio and doing production whenever they’d let him. He was sending me tapes all the time and would say, “What do you think of this? What do you think of that?” Then one day I look around and he’s coming back to St. Louis as the Imaging Director for the Point when alternative first hit with that filtered voice effect and everything. It was right down Jude’s alley. He came in and from there went on to Chicago, and now I think he’s doing imaging work around the world. He’s gone on to be a phenomenal success.
Guys in the smaller markets are always telling me, “We’re having trouble finding talent,” and I keep telling them, “It’s not that the talent’s not there. It’s hard for us to kick the talent out of our markets!” I get a lot of talented interns, but everybody wants to start in St. Louis. They don’t want to go to the smaller markets. Whenever I get somebody who’s really talented, I kick them out of the nest. I say, “Listen, you have got to leave town. Here are five guys’ names to go call right now in smaller markets. Of those five, somebody’s bound to have something.” And I’ll make phone calls and say, “Hey, listen, I’ve got a guy here; he’s just going to explode. You get him now and he can be working for you as he explodes, or he’ll go some place else.”
We should always be encouraging the young talent because, you never know, next year I might be calling one of those guys looking for a job. One of them is a Program Director right now here in town. Who knows, I might be looking for a job one day and I can call and go, “Hey, remember when you were my intern?”