My life in Advertising: Yara Nemr

Yara Nemr is a senior media relations executive at RPR, the Public Relations arm of Rizk Group. In the following, Yara narrates how a typical day in the life of a PR executive goes by and the typical responsibilities her job entails. I am a sleepy girl, so you can imagine what my mornings are like especially when I have to wake up at 6:30 am! Having said that, and now that you know how cranky I am in the mornings, let me tell you a bit about my usual day in PR. I wake up at 6:30 am every weekday, do my morning routine, and leave the house at 7:30 am. I spend at least 1 hour on the road to reach the office (I’m not nagging). I get there, check my emails, reply to a few, and then my day officially starts at around 9:30 am. Between replying to emails, preparing reports, and checking the media portals for news about our clients and their competitors, it is already around 12 pm. Being a senior media relations executive, part of my job is maintaining good relationships with the media. In fact, my primary duties are to protect and promotes the image of our clients in a proper, coordinated, and consistent manner while cultivating and enhancing collaborative working relationships within the press and publicity community. And what I love most about PR is the people I get to meet along the way. While some merely remain colleagues, others become friends and family. So, part of my daily routine is calling the media to chit chat and gossip a bit. After all, I am a PR person so you can guess how much I love to talk. I am not going to elaborate much about my lunch break since I usually have lunch at my office. You see, I am a smoker so I would rather save that time for my cigarettes break. After having refueled energy, I go back to calling media people, only this time it is to determine the exact publicity-related goals we can achieve, from press release coverage, and/or securing interviews; also to follow up on event attendance. It is now almost 4 pm, and I usually have meetings scheduled at that time of the day. I try as much as I can to schedule all my meetings in the afternoon so that I have time to finish my work at the office. If I don’t have a meeting, then I definitely have an event that we spent the previous month or so planning for. The day of the event is usually pretty hectic at the office, but we make sure to schedule 1 hour prior to the event to fixing our hair and makeup. Working at a company whose employees are mostly girls (we are keen on supporting the female quota in Lebanon), you can imagine what the office would look like on the day of the event. Now the day is over, and I am back to my favourite spot on earth: my bed! Good night.