Graduation Was the Perfect Promo

It was with dramatic inflections—à la Rod Serling—that Tony Benitez delivered his graduation speech.

The Santa Monica High School graduate and a military veteran, now 30, voiced the fitting “outro” recently at the first graduation ceremony for a yearlong certification program at Santa Monica College called Promo Pathway:

"It was just so unreal. One moment, you’re at home watching TV and the next you're meeting the people that make TV programming happen.

"Twenty-five scholarships to write pretty little scripts, haiku script, to story-tell through video editing, graphics, sound design.

"It was a golden ticket, and the promo industry was our chocolate factory."

Launched a year ago, the Promo Pathway program trains students—many of them minorities who were considered "at risk" in youth—to create promotional spots for TV shows and films. Benitez was one of 23 graduates who earned a promotion writer/producer/editor certificate.

Each of the students was selected from a pool of 300 applicants and received the training on full scholarships with a grant from the Everychild Foundation.  

“It was a huge opportunity that I think I would [have been] a fool to pass up. Even though it was a lot of work, it was the chance of the lifetime,” Benitez said.

From the perspective of onathan Block-Verk, president and CEO of PROMAXBDA, there's a serious divide between media storytellers and media viewers. Fifty percent of the American population is not white, yet the people who are making TV by and large are, he said.

"If the people who are creating those stories are not representative of the people viewing them, there’s going to be a deflection," Block-Verk said. "Without a question, there needs to be more diverse ideas, more ideas from different perspectives and geographic areas."

For Benitez, the certificate program was an opportunity to make money while tapping his creative side after four years of regimented training in the Marine Corps. It was also a way out of the management side of the media industry; he had been doing scheduling for a Fox affiliate when he applied for the Promo Pathway program.

He's working full time now at the Lifetime network as an associate producer, creating promotional pieces for in-house movies and TV shows.

 “There was this one promo I did … it was based on a true story of a wife who had killed her husband who was a pastor… he was very abusive… [the promo was] 15 seconds, dark and gritty… the movie got 4 million viewers. For Lifetime, that’s big. I was told it had a lot to do with publicity… but I think it was the promo,” he said good-naturedly. 

Like Benitez, graduate Shanita Murray, 29, had already earned a bachelor’s degree by the time she entered the program. She, too, was looking for a fresh start in a creative capacity. The daughter of a mentally disabled single parent, she said she grew up raising her younger brother and sister and had worked since she was younger than 16.

“I had held so many different jobs; this program exposed me to my talents, things that I was naturally good at all my life,” she said. “This is the one time in my life when I was finally able to realize my passions.”

Instructors, industry professionals and mentors walked the students through the entire process, including how to pitch ideas to producers, develop marketing plans and accounting classes in case they graduated to go into business for themselves, and essential software like Dreamweaver, Final Cut Pro and Photoshop.

“It felt good not only to graduate, but to graduate and know that I had a valued skill set,” said Murray, who starts a new full-time job as an associate producer at the Style Network on Monday.