Ellen Drower, Publicity & Communications Manager at Wētā FX

Massey University Bachelor of Communication in Public Relations (2010) 
 

Q: How would you describe the communication field as a career option to young people?  

Career-wise, there are so many different avenues that you can go down, depending on how you like to work and what interests you. As an example, agency roles allow you to work on multiple brands at once, while working alongside people who eat, sleep, and breathe comms – a great environment for learning and gaining a breadth of experience!  

Personally, I prefer in-house roles where I can be a comms expert embedded within an organisation, often in a completely different field. This has led me to working in a variety of industries, including foreign affairs, travel, and now, entertainment and technology.  

I love working in comms as it allows me to be both creative and strategic, while leveraging my interpersonal and communication skills (i.e. people and talking!) for the greater good. 

Q: You've been out in the communication field gaining experience for about 15 years. What's changed over that time and what has remained fundamentally core to the work you do? 

I graduated from Massey University in 2010, about a month after Instagram was first released, so it’s safe to say the media landscape and content consumption habits have changed drastically since then. Not to mention the dreaded (or lauded) AI – I promise I wrote every word of this, I simply like an em dash!  

These days, integrated campaigns across paid, earned, and owned channels are the norm, with PR and communications often taking a brand stewardship role that helps curate and protect how a brand and its messaging shows up externally, no matter the platform or execution.  

While the tactics of reaching audiences may have changed – now spanning everything from social content to traditional press coverage, brand partnerships, and beyond – the fundamentals of communications theory has relatively stayed the same. We still identify target audiences, articulate the messages we want to tell them, and figure out how to overcome barriers so our messages resonate and achieve the desired result. 

Q: What are your main highlights over the years? 

I’ve been incredibly lucky to have had a huge range of experiences in my career. After a couple years at the Australian High Commission in Wellington, I cut my teeth working at Tourism New Zealand in Auckland, hosting international travel media in some of the most beautiful parts of the country. Then, after a brief taste of agency life, I headed to London to work with Tourism New Zealand again, representing Aotearoa in Germany and the UK. Key memories from that period include travelling around Germany to build relationships with editors, as their media landscape is geographically dispersed, and attending the Telegraph Travel Awards in London as New Zealand won Best Country in back-to-back years. Like all workplaces, it’s really the people who are the highlight – I loved working with the London team to localise global campaigns like “#GetNZonTheMap” and activate new partnerships including a campaign with Bauer radio stations that reached 1 in 10 UK adults. 

I often say I “accidentally” moved home in March 2020, when the pandemic shut the borders while I was back in New Zealand for a work trip. After a few months of camping out on my mum’s dining table, I decided to make the move home permanent and joined Tourism New Zealand’s newly minted Domestic team, created to encourage Kiwis to “Do Something New” and explore their own backyard. Highlights there included helping leverage paid media partnerships and working closely with the social team on content-led campaigns like “Please Don’t Travel Under The Social Influence”, which was picked up in The Guardian, BBC, and The New York Times. 

I’ve been with Wētā FX since 2021 and have loved applying my PR and comms experience to the visual effects industry. I am so proud to be a cheerleader for some of our country’s greatest creative and technical talent and have been honoured to support our people as they represent New Zealand’s filmmaking expertise on the world stage. My work is varied and includes everything from planning how we will leverage a film’s release in local and international press, to partnering with our studio clients to create content and support awards season campaigns. I’ve also been lucky enough to get my elbows out in the sea of Hollywood publicists working the red carpets of the Oscars and BAFTAs. 

Q: You've travelled and gained international perspectives. It can feel daunting for a young person to consider that, but would you encourage them to give it a try?  

If you have the opportunity, I cannot recommend travelling and working overseas highly enough. Not only do you get to explore new places, you get to learn about yourself and challenge your own preconceptions about the world and your place in it. I feel deeply privileged for having travelled like I have, and I count the lessons I have learned while doing so – both professionally and personally – as my most valuable. 

Ultimately, people are people wherever you go, so communication skills are easily transferable, but every city and country has slightly different ways of working. I’ve learned a lot from each – from my LA friends, I’ve learned the art of making connections and building trust quickly, from the Brits I’ve learned the importance of finding ideas that stand out in a noisy crowd, and from the Germans I’ve learned the value of authenticity and understanding the market you’re working in – including how imperative it is to not jaywalk at an empty intersection if the pedestrian light is red! 

Q: You did postgraduate study in event management - tell us about how that's helped you carve a distinctive niche for yourself in the industry. 

In the early days, I thought I might work in the music industry and dreamt of managing music festivals and global tours, so after my degree I studied event management and interned at a festival as part of that. While the rockstar life didn’t eventuate, that additional study and experience set up me up with planning, execution, and project management skills that I still use to this day. An event manager has to wear a lot of different hats, and events are often a key tactic in publicity and communications, so there are a lot of crossovers and benefits in having experience from multiple vantage points.   

Q: Now you are at Wētā FX - what do you enjoy most about that role? 

As cheesy as it sounds, I love showing off the incredible work my colleagues do every day. Even after five years, I am constantly blown away by the creative and technical feats they achieve, often inventing new ways to create visual effects that have never been seen before. We literally have world-class talent sitting in a quiet corner of Miramar in Wellington, and they are working on some of the coolest projects that the entire globe ends up watching. 

Q: You've mentioned the solid foundation and practical experience that Massey gave you - can you give us an example? 

Ironically, one of my worst grades at university was a paper on international public relations, which I’ve since effectively specialised in. That aside, the practical theory I learned at university provided a ground truth foundation for me to build my work experience on. To this day, I lean on core concepts like news values and interpersonal communication models when building out strategies or providing guidance.  

During my studies, I also had the opportunity to road test my skills with real-world projects and internships. This was the key that opened the door to my career, as I graduated during the global financial crisis and had no established contacts or industry references. I needed to convince an employer to take a chance on me, so having practical experience with the likes of UNICEF definitely helped. 

Q: Any final words? 

I have made lots of friends during my career who have come from similar educational backgrounds and we’ve all gone on to do really different, interesting things. A Bachelor of Communication is a great springboard to launch your career from, as it’s flexible enough to support your interests and whatever future you choose to pursue.