Marketing Communications Today Blog

The WVU EcoCAR team recently won 3rd place Overall, 1st place for Best Communications Presentation, 1st place Overall Communications Program, 1st place for Best Drive Cycle, and 1st place for Collaboration for Year 3 of the EcoCAR Mobility Challenge (EMC). EMC is a multi-year Advanced Vehicle Technology Competition (AVTCs) that is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, Argonne National Laboratory, and General Motors. It challenges 11 universities across North America to transform a 2019 Chevrolet Blazer into an energy efficient, hybrid-electric vehicle with autonomous capabilities through adaptive cruise control features.

Since the inception of AVTCs in 1988, West Virginia University has participated in 9 out of the 12 competitions. The competition provides valuable hands-on experience for students to learn in-depth about the automotive industry through engineering, business, and communications fields.

I’m the current Communications Manager for the team, which encompasses a variety of roles. I work on all communication related deliverables for the competition as a well as managing social media accounts, coordinating outreach events, and any design elements the team may need. Working for this team has allowed me to push myself and grow as a communicator.

Why do walled gardens exist in the first place? The answer is quite simple, because they can. When it comes to advertising, giant firms like Facebook and LinkedIn hold all their own cards. And with the demise of 3rd party data and cookies, the amount of data they have on users who readily allow access to personal information is unprecedented. But we are learning that this may spell bad news in the future for us marketers. Listen in to this episode with Heather Blank on how Walled Gardens will impact the future of advertising.

Ruth Stevens: What defines a walled garden and how does it fit in the marketing realm?

Heather Blank: In general, in the digital space, a walled garden means a platform or a website or an app where access to those users is guarded. Probably the best example and the one that people are mostly aware of is Facebook. Users are quarantined and segregated into the Facebook app and the Facebook website and advertisers must work directly with Facebook and Facebook tech to target those users. The measurement must happen within the platform of Facebook as well, and the data about those users and their interactions on the Facebook app or website are not accessible over the entire Internet.

In this provocative episode, database management expert Theresa Kushner explains why she believes that the marketing profession as we know it today is obsolete. What does this mean for the future of the marketing discipline, and for organizations as a whole? Listen here to find out.

Ruth Stevens: We're dying to know what you meant by this very provocative statement, marketing is dead.

Theresa Kushner: First of all, Ruth, it's your fault to begin with here. You sent the article from marketing profs about ‘is the marketing database dead’ and I thought, it's the wrong question, it's not the database and marketing that's dead, it's the fact that marketing has been countermanded. It's been taken over by sales, it's been taken over by strategy, it's been taken over by operations, it's just so dispersed throughout the organization that as a discipline it doesn't have the force it once had. You could see that from the fact that marketing has adjectives in front of it now. It’s relationship marketing or it’s Internet marketing or it’s partner marketing, it doesn't have its own, definable entity. And, quite frankly, when it disperses like that, you get sections and portions of marketing that can be so easily absorbed into other disciplines.

Graduation, a time of celebration. It’s also a time to recognize the sacrifices and support of family and friends who carried the graduate through the tougher times, especially the tougher times in the past year. We united to celebrate the accomplishments of not only the Class of 2021, but also the Class of 2020.

I’ve overseen the WVU Marketing Communications online programs for over 15 years, since 2005. That means that I have had the distinct honor and privilege of recognizing every student that has ever completed the program as they walk across the stage, aside from the one year my sister’s wedding coincided with graduation weekend. This year’s ceremony was different. We gathered at the Mountaineer Field at Milan Puskar Stadium and we were fortunately greeted with perfect weather. While the scenario was different, the purpose was not.