ON FIRE: For two years, Richard A. Pomes jet-setted across the country as a brand ambassador for Fireball Whiskey. (
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MEDIA MAVEN: At TheLadders, brand ambassador Amanda Augustine handles the job-search firm’s social media efforts. (
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For Richard A. Pomes, his fondest memory of being the public face of Fireball Whisky isn’t what people expect him to say.
It wasn’t “the free booze or all the women,” says the 28-year-old.
Instead, it was a trip to a mountain resort outside Los Angeles. But then, he and a colleague were caught in a whiteout. They hit a rock. A tire exploded. His fingers were getting numb as he changed the tire. He knew the business of marketing whiskey — but he didn’t know a thing about mountain weather.
“I hadn’t seen so much snow in my life,” says the New Orleans native.
From 2010 until the end of last year, Pomes was Fireball’s “brand ambassador,” and the gig gave him dozens of lessons on how to navigate through life.
Previously viewed as a part-time gig involving girls doling out shots at bars or suburban entrepreneurs hawking Amway products, the concept of brand ambassador is evolving into a full-time marketing job in industries ranging from electronics to staffing and more.
Although they now also perform traditional office work, other duties include traveling around the country, posting up a storm on social media, making presentations at industry conventions, working the press, leading informal classes for customers and even cultivating friendships with potential clients.
Although the line of work Pomes and others are in obliterates the separation of work and personal life, they say they dig almost every minute of the job.
“The thing I enjoyed most was the traveling,” says Pomes, who left town weekly to promote the brand. “So much of it was exploration of the unknown.”
“Brand ambassadorship has become a global phenomenon,” adds Amanda Augustine, the brand ambassador for job-matching firm TheLadders, where she spreads the word about the company. “It’s one of the ways a company can humanize its brand.”
Companies also employ brand ambassadors to target hard-to-reach younger customers who don’t respond to more traditional forms of advertising.
Pomes, who is now the co-founder of the marketing firm RapJab, says Fireball’s management were great businessmen, but they needed help connecting with young imbibers — which is where he came in.
“They asked, ‘Do you think this is cool?’ ” he says. “And they were like, ‘Can you help us make it cooler?’ So I think it’s all about credibility.”
So Pomes, in effort to socialize Fireball into the alt-rock subculture of the service industry, set out to make the whiskey hip. He jetted to hipster enclaves like Austin, San Diego and New York City, on a mission to befriend bartenders with dinners, drinks and even trips to strip clubs and concerts. They’d wind up drinking it after work — and even on the job, because the price of the whiskey — which retails between $15 and $20 for a fifth — was so low bars still made money off it.
And it worked. Fireball exploded as one of the fastest-growing spirits in the country. Since the institution of its brand ambassador strategy, Facebook “likes” skyrocketed from 150 to 30,000, says Pomes.
“It became this kind of secret handshake between bartenders that got passed around the country,” he notes. “My whole goal was to make friends in the name of the product. It sounds very superficial from a certain point of view, but I made a lot of good friends I’m still in touch with.”
Brand ambassadorships aren’t usually so raucous. At TheLadders, Augustine spreads the word “across all platforms.” The 31-year-old pens a weekly column, “Ask Amanda,” for the site’s customers, creates content with corporate partners like iVillage and maintains Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts.
She also spends a quarter of her time traveling to give workshops and presentations, and she volunteers for StreetWise Partners, a free job-training program for “highly motivated people who face multiple barriers to unemployment.”
Although TheLadders’ reputation is to hook up high-earners with high-paying jobs, part of Augustine’s job description is to reach out to the under-30 crowd, many of whom would consider a job at Costco a sweet deal given the current economy.
“By 2020, 46 percent of the workforce will be millennials, so it’s important I educate the younger population of professionals, especially since they will be required to fill that leadership gap in less than a decade,” says Augustine.
As great as the gig sounds, it’s not all fun and games: Brand ambassadorship can take over someone’s life.
“It’s intense — and it can be exhausting,” says Anne-Louis Marquis, the brand ambassador for Pernod Absinthe.
Even Pomes — who arguably had the most fun job on earth with Fireball — grew weary of 4 a.m. bedtimes and the all-hours access he afforded people.
“There’s a side of it that’s really cool because — boom! — it’s instant celebrity. But after that wears off, it’s like, ‘Why are people calling me at 4 a.m. drunk?’ ” he says. “I got a lot of drunk people screaming into the phone because they were drinking Fireball.
“No matter where I went or what I did, it was impossible to escape it.”
But what other job would let someone indulge the instruction they’ve received as a circus performer?
Marquis does the usual brand ambassador work — traveling from New York to Los Angeles once a month, concocting absinthe-based drinks for bartenders, filling orders for the beverage’s fancy glassware — but she also does grassroots p.r. work to combat a century of misconceptions about the tipple.
“We had this very effective smear campaign that was in the 1900s to get rid of absinthe, and a lot of those misconceptions are still in place,” she says. “I’ve worked with bartenders who think absinthe isn’t real or that it makes you hallucinate.”
She’s also brought her love of performance to her work: For an event celebrating “National Absinthe Day” on March 5, she’s creating an “absinthe peep show” at downtown drinkery Apotheke.
“There’s going to be a girl in this fabulous costume in a booth. You go in, you sit down, you pick up a telephone, and someone’s on the other end. You can’t see them. You place your order, and the curtains open and,” she finishes cryptically, “something’s going to happen.”
HOW TO GET INTO THE BIZ
So youwant to be a brand ambassador. Here’s some advice from full-timeveterans of the business:
Be a social-media maven: “Interact with your favorite brands on social media,” says Richard A. Pomes, former brand ambassador for Fireball Whisky. “Companies are looking to hire their most passionate fans, and the easiest way to find those people is on Facebook and Twitter.” But don’t expect to get hired full-time just because you have a nice Facebook chat: Many brand ambassadors are hired on a one-off or parttime basis.
Know your portfolio: You need to work in—and be an expert about — the industry you wish to represent, says Amanda Augustine, a job search expert at TheLadders, a job-matching firm. “I’m not just a brand ambassador. I’m also a certified professional coach and and résumé writer,” she says.
Be the brand: It’s not enough just to be savvy about the product you want to represent. “When brands see people who embody the characteristics of their product, they reach out,” says Anne-Louis Marquis, national brand ambassador for Pernod Absinthe.
“I’m a bartender with experience in classic and highvolume bars, (and) I’m French with an arts background.”
Take classes: Although there’s no degree available in brand ambassadorship, it helps to take courses in public speaking, communications, marketing and social media.
Network: “Go to events and introduce yourself to as many movers and shakers as you can,” says Pomes, now the cofounder of RapJab,a marketing firm. “I came up in the New Orleans nightclub and music promotions scene. I just partied all the time until people started asking me to party for money.”