Lala has worked as a financial editor for five years. Before that, she did content marketing at a first-party company — she switched to the agency side because she didn't like dealing with people and preferred working with information and reports. Now she wants to switch back to the first-party side, because she sees an opening for liberal arts students to catch the AI wave.
Every spring and summer, Lala has a habit: she goes to several job interviews, partly to see what the market looks like outside her current company, partly to explore side hustles. This summer, she noticed a new pattern.
She first applied for a "Financial Media PR" position at an AI hardware company that had just raised major funding. The two interview rounds went quickly and smoothly, and she soon received a formal offer. She ultimately turned it down because of the company's poor public reputation, but the experience gave her a huge insight: this year was her chance to catch the AI express train.
She began focusing intensively on roles at companies in financing windows — AI startups hungry for publicity. She interviewed with one of the "Six Little Dragons" (rising Chinese AI startups), a mid-to-late stage company sprinting for an IPO, and a startup in a track she's optimistic about.
Her observation: companies in the financing stage value your resources and capabilities most. They give you publicity topics and ask you to design plans as a written test. They want results fast, so they're more lenient on abstract questions like your understanding of the industry.
"I think as AI has developed to this day, everyone who wants to make a living creating content should think carefully about their career choices," Lala said. "I can increasingly feel that AI is severely hitting the confidence and passion of content creators."
She believes the confusion for traditional content teams is that their clients are mainly large internet companies, and the hottest industry right now is AI — but AI startups rarely have big marketing budgets. Combined with AI's ability to replace basic content creation, the threshold for producing "good enough" content has dropped dramatically.
"Whether from the perspective of creating high-quality content or achieving good commercial returns, many content teams are in the painful period of transformation. Going to a first-party company to see if you can play to your differentiated advantages in content creation is also a viable choice."