aprd spotlights

Meet Erin Willis

Anonymous — Wed, 19 Oct 2016 23:24:35 +0000

Meet Erin Willis Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/19/2016 - 17:24

Assistant Professor of Advertising, Public Relations and Media Design • Studies Online Health Communities

When Erin Willis first graduated from college, she took a public relations job in Chicago. “Because I like people. Of course! Why else do you do PR?” she thought. Her degree was in public relations and she felt capable of the work, but she didn’t really know what kind of career she wanted. After a few years of work in the industry and a few more running a regional tourism magazine in Missouri, Willis gave in to her “quarter-life crisis,” as she refers to it, and returned to school for a master’s degree in strategic communications—an overarching term for the ways in which organizations use advertising, public relations and design to communicate.

There, Willis found her passion in her side job at an arthritis rehabilitation facility. While translating medical research on arthritis into news articles for general audiences, she became fascinated by how people read and understand health information. “Everyone thinks that health communication is so different from PR, but in reality health communication is just persuasive messages related to health,” she explains.

Inspired to pursue a doctorate, Willis started to explore online health communities. She wondered: were people coping with their disease symptoms outside of traditional health care organizations? “We do this all the time with other aspects of our lives,” she says. “Your car breaks and you Google it to find an online forum to help. We do this with our health too.”

“It’s so interesting to try to understand people’s motivations, to try to crack that code.”
-Erin Willis

Willis’ research shows that many patients use online communities to share methods of coping with their shared disease and to support one another. Today, she’s beginning to study how online health communities can be structured to connect patients with medical specialists, to encourage and enable members of the online community to take action to manage their disease.

But Willis has never left public relations behind. “I study health communication,” she explains, “but I think it’s really just PR in disguise. It’s so interesting to try to understand people’s motivations.” As a young professor at the University of Memphis, Willis was given responsibility for her public relations department’s struggling internship program. She brought in industry professionals to mentor students as part of the program. Motivated and informed by their discussions with professionals, Willis’s students soon secured many more internships and jobs.

Now, as a professor at CMCI, she continues to seek out new ways to get students hands-on experience with the public relations industry. “The new college and my department are finally bringing public relations to Boulder,” Willis says. “I am thrilled to be part of this beginning. PR is a growing field and I know my students will be successful. I’m really lucky to be able to do what I do.”

An assistant professor who studies online health communities — “It’s so interesting to try to understand people’s motivations, to try to crack that code.”

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Meet Haley Buchner

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Jan 2016 23:35:00 +0000

Meet Haley Buchner Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 01/21/2016 - 16:35

Advertising Graduate (’15) • Award-Winning Art Director

Two months before her spring 2015 graduation, Haley Buchner pulled some of the hardest all-nighters of her life. For three weeks, she and her two teammates—Steph Hayden and Rachel Edwards—spent their nights and weekends working on their entries to the prestigious Young Ones international advertising contest. Their goal, set by the contest organizers, was to develop a product idea and advertising campaign around the theme of kids and technology. Their solution was groundbreaking: a workbook printed in conductive ink, helping kids to recycle old household electronics and learn the basics of electrical engineering.

The idea, called Inkventions, represented everything Buchner loves about advertising. “I knew that I wanted to have a career that would allow me to make a cultural impact in some way,” she says. The idea that the right fusion of artistic creativity and business insight can change popular culture drew her to advertising as a sophomore. And her team created its contest entry with this idea in mind.

The Inkventions workbook would be printed in conductive ink, transforming the pages into circuit boards. With tips from the workbook, kids could find and disassemble old household electronics, plugging the parts into the printed circuit boards. Buchner’s team envisioned IBM as a corporate sponsor of the workbook, making the company an advocate for both a new style of technology education and electronic waste reduction. While the project—like all Young Ones student entries—was only a hypothetical product, the team produced a video and series of graphics to promote their concept.

“I loved my intro to creative class. I couldn’t believe that was a class I could come to college and get credit for.”
- Haley Buchner

At the Young Ones awards in New York City, Inkventions won a silver award. It was the second year Buchner had won silver. “You just felt on top of the world,” she remembers. “We were getting multiple job offers at the top companies—everywhere we wanted to work.” In addition to her team, 11 other CU-Boulder students took home awards.

Buchner credits the drive of CU advertising students for much of this success. “The amount of time that the kids who do really well in the advertising program spent working on stuff is insane. We pulled all-nighters after all-nighters after all-nighters for two years,” she explains. “Everyone is really focused.”

For Buchner, that hard work paid creative dividends. A few months after graduation, she moved to New York City to work as an art director at Johannes Leonardo, a top advertising firm. She’s excited to work for a small firm that does work for big clients. She especially likes their recent Adidas Superstar campaign, which re-launched Adidas’s classic shoe with a message that challenged our culture’s obsession with fame. “It’s exactly the kind of campaign with cultural impact that first attracted me to advertising.”

Buchner’s team produced a short video to demonstrate the Inkventions concept.
[video:https://vimeo.com/123476071]

A recent graduate and an award-winning art director — “I loved my intro to creative class. I couldn’t believe that was a class I could come to college and get credit for.”

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Meet Kelly Graziadei

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Jan 2016 23:26:30 +0000

Meet Kelly Graziadei Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 01/21/2016 - 16:26

1997 graduate • Director of Global Marketing Solutions at Facebook

Kelly Graziadei had a lot going on in her life when Facebook offered her a job. But she just couldn’t turn down the company that started the social media revolution.

“Facebook was a rocket ship and I wanted to get on it,” she explains.

When you absentmindedly whip out your phone and scroll through Facebook or Instagram, you probably think you’re just killing time. But Graziadei knows something much bigger is going on. Since 2013, Americans have spent more time on their phones and computers than in front of the TV. “A media shift like this hasn’t happened since the 1950s, when TV overtook print,” she explains. “Social media is now mainstream media."

As director of global marketing solutions at Facebook, Graziadei’s job is to figure out how advertisers can best use social media. Traditionally, advertising was simply about reaching the highest possible number of people. With social media advertisers can target their messages to the most likely buyers. “We want advertising to be as good as what your friends post on your Facebook feed,” says Graziadei, who sometimes drops into advertising classes by Skype to share her knowledge with CMCI students.

“Social media is now mainstream media.”
-Kelly Graziadei

Graziadei didn’t plan on a career in technology when she left CU in 1997, but when a telecommunications company offered a job with a nice title and a good paycheck, she took it.

It didn’t work out the way she planned. “Fast forward a few months in and I found myself in a call center playing the tambourine to greet employees off the elevator in the morning … all in the name of selling Caller ID,” she recalls.

She quit that job and worked her way through a variety of increasingly high-profile companies, including time at Yahoo, before she landed at Facebook.

“I love the opportunity to build something new,” she says. “To be in an industry where so much hasn’t been done before.”

A graduate of the advertising program who is director of global marketing solutions at Facebook — “Social media is now mainstream media.”

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