Life after One Creator Lab
By Alixandra Rutnik
One Creator Lab graduate gets hired as a Content Creator at United Airlines
POV: You’re watching Reels of travel influencers flying first class thinking, “What the heck?!” I want to fly first class and have a shower cabin. And snacks. And a bed with 500 thread count sheets. And gourmet meals.
To be honest though, I am a little skeptical of this shower water, but a bed with silky sheets sounds nice
One Creator Lab, developed by The One Club for Creativity, and sponsored by TikTok is a creator education program designed to teach students how to create content at the speed of culture and get ad agencies and brands to hire them as content creators on their creative teams.
Ben Rhinesmith is one of the most recent One Creator Lab students hired three months after graduation as a Content Creator for United Airlines. I interviewed him about where he was before OCL, what he gained from participating in the program, where he’s at now, and what he’s up to at United Airlines.
Ben is a stand-up comedian who lives in Los Angeles, California. Before Ben applied and was accepted into One Creator Lab, the extent of his content creation was to promote his comedy acts on social media. He says, “I’m used to generating regular social media content– Different skits to get myself out there and whatnot.” He has a background in music production and worked closely with musicians in PR for many years. Ben also produced a podcast for almost a decade that featured athletes, comedians, actors, and social media influencers, which was part of various independent business ventures.
He heard about One Creator Lab from his fiancée, Courtney Rice, who happens to be a One School graduate, which is The One Club for Creativity’s free portfolio school for Black Creatives. They were on a multi-month trip in Europe when she pitched the program to him and he almost put it off, but ultimately decided to make the application video and send it in when they were in Portugal. Ben remarks, “I’m really glad I did because I don’t know what would have happened if I just said, ah, maybe I’ll try to catch the next cohort.”
The structure of One Creator Lab encourages students to solve real briefs, build their creator portfolios, and gain the experience they need to join creative teams at agencies and brands. During Ben’s 16 weeks of OCL, he took all the information he had been collecting over the years and turned it into the foundation he needed to get into advertising. “The biggest takeaway was not only the physical portfolio of work I put together, but also the bolster it gave me,” Ben says.
Ben shares that most of his group comes from unconventional and nonlinear career paths like himself. “A cool connective tissue in my fall cohort is that we’re all from different backgrounds, but in a similar position of learning how to harness our skills in a consistent and professional endeavor,” he observes.
Frustrated with his career direction, Ben used OCL to make a pivot and is now channeling his excellent creator skills at United Airlines. “Now that I’ve gone through the program I feel like a legitimate content creator. Everything we did throughout the program is applied in one way or another in my current role, which is fantastic,” he says. OCL gave him the confidence boost he needed to pursue content creation full time.
“Now that I’ve gone through the program I feel like a legitimate content creator. Everything we did throughout the program is applied in one way or another in my current role, which is fantastic.”
Diving into Ben’s day-to-day work at United, there’s a lot going on and he describes it as a blend of corporate and creative. He sources trending ideas on TikTok and Instagram, gets paid to scroll, and participates in a lot of team brainstorming sessions. Ben describes, “To be effective on social, you need to have a level of looseness, which is not coded language to do whatever you want. It means if you’re really going to make an impact on TikTok you have to understand the conversation and how you can insert yourself into the dialogue without causing drama– I love the creativity of piecing that puzzle together.”
Ben notes on some of the challenges too, like the zillion layers of legal approval and when the idea you just spent a month on gets squashed by the boss’s boss’s boss. “When you work for a big juggernaut brand like United, not every cool meme idea gets off the ground and you just have to roll with the punches, keep the ideas flowing, and be nimble about it,” Ben comments.
“When you work for a big juggernaut brand like United, not every cool meme idea gets off the ground and you just have to roll with the punches, keep the ideas flowing, and be nimble about it.”
When discussing Gen Z’s influence on our world Ben exclaims, “I love Gen Z because they’re equal parts, the most unserious yet incredibly serious generation I think we’ve ever had– Appealing to Gen Z is basically my job.” He spends a lot of his time creating trending videos, like the Reel of Snoop Dogg during the Paris 2024 Olympics that went viral and got picked up by earned media. “I took the sound of him commentating on the badminton games in the very silly way only Snoop can do, and turned it into a funny Instagram Reel that showed off our planes,” he describes.
“I love Gen Z because they’re equal parts, the most unserious yet incredibly serious generation I think we’ve ever had.”
Ben’s future career goal is to secure a job as a social strategist. “Within the next five years, I want to work with a team to create the content plan rather than being the one creating the content,” he concludes.
And in terms of flying first class, up in the sky, popping champagne, and living the life, Ben says that the new United Neo Airbus line is premium because even in economy you can connect your AirPods to the screen in front of you