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A General Reflection of the Marketing Seminar Series.

Over the course of the semester, I’ve heard many stories about how these speakers were able to begin their marketing careers and the paths that led them to where they are right now. Here are a few of the most important takeaways from these lectures.

 1. Everybody has a different path

Since a young age, we’ve followed the same general plan of waking up going to school and then repeating this process until we finished university. The expectation after we’ve finished school is that we find a job in our field of study and then that’s it. After following a set structure for so long, when things don’t go as we planned, we have to find a way to adapt.

The idea of everybody has a different path was often discussed. That unique and unconventional can still lead you to where you want to be in the future. Robyn Bregman nailed this point in for me. Her path was very unusual and now she’s in a position that she loves.  For me, I’ve personally struggled with this idea. I know that there are so many different paths that can lead me to where I want to go in my career. The problem was that I always had this idea and plan of what I wanted to happen next.

After seeing so many people I know be able to follow a more conventual path and get to where they want to be. That’s what I wanted. That’s not the case, but I’ve finally come to like the idea of taking a more unique path to lead me to my end goal. There are so many more things that I can learn and expose myself to by taking a unique path. Instead of looking at my indirect path being a hindrance to myself, it should be seen as an opportunity to explore and learn from many different people.

2. Networking is Key

The more people you know, the wider your reach is and the better of chance that you’ll know somebody that knows somebody that’s looking to fill a position that you have the necessary skills for. Just having these people as a connection on your LinkedIn page isn’t enough to guarantee that you’ll get the job. When building out your network you want to have a genuine connection with these people. That means having a discussion, learning more about them and even asking questions and bouncing your thoughts onto them. Creating a personal connection is what will get you the job. Not adding everybody onto your LinkedIn and not knowing who any of them are.

I never liked the idea of putting myself out there to possibly either face rejection or make a fool out of myself by saying something dumb. However, that’s not a great way to approach life and even your career. You can’t learn from mistakes if you’re not putting yourself in the proper position to do so. This seminar class taught me that networking doesn’t need to be a scary task and that it can be simple and very rewarding.

3. How to Stand Out

 It’s really interesting to think that we all have different backgrounds and interests and yet we still felt that there wasn’t anything special about us to stand out. A lot of the speakers spoke about how you can stand out from your competition by showing your personality. That sounds like a pretty normal thing for anybody to do, however, when you’re looking to make a good impression, we tend to not always be ourselves.

Showing your personality is the best way to get the point across that you are a unique individual. It will show off your skills, your sense of humour and even your work ethic. Of course, it’s a good idea to try and plan out and think about who you are as a person and what makes you unique. It might not feel like we stand out, but we all have past experiences, interests and stories that have led us to where we are now. Thinking about those and using them to create your unique story is the best way to stand out from the crowd.

Network and Resources.

I didn’t end up networking directly with any of the speakers. However, I was able to take a lot of the ideas that they spoke about and had used them to reach out to people in the marketing industry that are currently doing jobs that I am interested in. I hope to speak with Kareem Perez in the future. Lots of my classmates have talked to him and have come away with a great discussion from him. So, I hope when I reach out after exams that I can learn a lot more from him. With Mr. Perez having a huge pool for his network, if I can establish a relationship with him, I might be able to find a permanent job in marketing in the future.

Unfortunately, due to the on-going pandemic that the world is facing, volunteering at events isn’t much of an option. When things start to go back to normal, I’m going to take a more active effort to find events that I can help out to build my network out.

While job hunting, reaching out to somebody that’s currently working the internship that I hope to land. I spoke and asked them questions about the job and what the job entails and steps they took to make themselves stand out from the crowd. They were very helpful and informative, and I was able to craft my resume and CV based on their recommendations. In the future, I’ll make sure to reach out and find people working in either the company or position that might be able to give me a bit more information on the company and what to expect for the job. Doing this will give me an advantage over the competition and hopefully land me a future job.

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MARKETING SEMINAR SERIES #3

Provide an overview of what the speakers said

For the second last week for our marketing seminar, our class had the pleasure of having Brady Dahmer give us a presentation about his career. Brady Dahmer is the founder of the Central Branch marketing agency out in Vancouver Canada. He was able to bring in a lot of insight into the inner and outer workings of what it takes to run and operate a successful agency especially with the global situation that the world is currently facing. As somebody who is looking to enter the agency workspace in the future, being able to listen and learn from somebody who is currently in the industry and running his own business, Brady was able to provide me with a lot of questions I was wondering about the what it’s like in an agency environment and what led to him building a company. 

The Power of Volunteering

I want to start off by saying, it was nice to hear a very successful story from somebody that was born and grew up in the tri-cities just like me. Brady was born and Kitchener and went to school in Toronto which follows a similar path to me. Mr. Dahmer went to school for graphic design, which turned out to be very valuable for him in progressing his career.  One of the main points that Brady Dahmer wanted to emphasize was the idea of volunteering and doing many other things that can help progress your career further than you could have imagined. Brady had a long and extensive list of places that he had volunteered for not only when he was in his undergraduate but also when he was working full time. Being able to volunteer at places like the Toronto Film Festival for multiple years allowed Brady to learn and work on many different aspects of marketing event planning, but also utilizing his design skills and advertising to help promote the festival. This also helped Brady in the future when he began planning his own film festival in Vancouver. Being a recurring figure and volunteer at the film festival allowed Brady to build relationships and expand his network. One of the recurring themes within these e-journals has been the need to increase the number of people in your network. It’s one thing to have people in your network, but actually working with them over an extended period of time and building an actual lasting relationship is much more valuable than just adding people onto your LinkedIn account.  Furthermore, the presentation spoke about enhancing and working on your skills in your free time. Doing side projects, freelancing and just generally betting on yourself can go a long way. For somebody that will most likely be looking for a full-time job after my co-op, it will be very important for me to continue to learn different skills and possibly offering and volunteering my services to possible start-ups and other smaller companies to add to my portfolio to show potential interviews what I can do. 

Pro and Cons of Agency Work

To continue, the second half of the presentation spoke about what it’s like working with a client, with Brady showing us examples of the work that he’s done. During the Q&A session, one of my classmates asked what was the best and worst thing about working in an agency. Brady said that the best and worst part was working with clients. I had a feeling that this word is a major part of working in an agency. Your experience will be very different depending on who you are working with. You might have this great idea that you think would be great for the campaign, until the client either might not like the idea or wants to take it a different direction. There’s a balance that needs to be found when working with a client on a project. You want to be able to create something that you are proud of while also making the client excited about what was created. There will be times when you have a great client you are working with you both get along great. But, there will be times when the client might be very difficult to work with and you’ll have to try and hide your frustration with them. There was also the aspect of what it’s like working for a large agency and a smaller agency. Both have pros and cons, but Brady highly recommended working for a small agency. It allows for the chance to be a part of a small group and lets you work on all the aspects of creating a final project. You would be able to see how people think and what ideas they come up with. Smaller agencies tend to have more freedom in what tasks you can do. Hearing this from Brady was very helpful. I know that I want to be working in an agency in the future, but do not know exactly what area I want to focus on. So, I think that looking for a smaller agency in the future to work for. That might give me a better insight into what I want to do in my future.

Final thoughts 

I think that Brady Dahmer was able to provide our class with some creative insight on what it’s like work in an agency and the different ways we can use our out of school experiences to further our careers. I believe that this was one of the better seminar classes that we had during this semester and I’m going to try and find new ways to better expand my network in a more meaningful way while also extending my marketing skills to put me in a better position to get achieve my future job.

[joshuaduncan-blog1]

My Mobile Day

How many apps do you have downloaded on your main mobile device?

My phone is a complete mess when it comes to apps.  When excluding the mandatory apps that come pre-installed on my iPhone, I have 63 apps installed onto my phone. I’m honestly pretty surprised that I have that many applications on my phone since it feels like I only use about 6-7 apps on a daily basis. A large majority of the apps on my phone are there just-in-case I ever need them for something super specific. A perfect example would be my money converting app. I only have it because the great aunt that I live with is always sending money to Jamaica and needs to know the conversion rate of Canadian dollars to Jamaican dollars.

What are your top five apps- name- category, type, etc.?

Here’s a list of my top 5 apps used on a daily basis.

1. Instagram (Social Media)

2. Twitter (Social Media)

3. Facebook Messenger (Social Media)

4. Safari (Entertainment)

5. Messages (iPhone texting app)

Twitter provides me updates on the news, Facebook messenger is used to contact classmates, Safari is used for Google and Messages is used to text my mom, so she doesn’t worry about me. Instagram provides 0 value to my life. It just makes me feel bad when I compare my life to others and waste my time. The time wasting really explains why Instagram is my #1 app. 

 I’ll be the first to admit that I’m totally addicted to my cell phone. I don’t really think it’s that big of a deal. I only spend maybe 90 percent of my time scrolling through one of my many social media apps. It’s the first thing I do when I wake up, go to bed, and even when I have to use the washroom. I don’t know how I survived without my phone. I can’t even remember life before I had a phone. Only thing I remember before I had my phone was having to use MapQuest to get around. I’m also pretty sure that my girlfriend has told me she thinks I like my phone more than her. Obviously, that’s not true but my phone is a clear close second. Okay, yeah maybe my phone addiction is a problem.

My favourite but the less used app has to be my TD bank app. This app is my favourite for just purely selfish reasons. I like seeing my paycheque gets deposited into my account every two weeks. However, I never really use it because checking how much I owe on my credit card and watching my savings dwindle down is extremely depressing. You would think being stuck inside would stop me from buying clothing that I can’t even wear/show off. But nope, I have 0 sense of logical and justify it by saying “when this is all done, I’m going to look so cool.” I refuse to admit I have a problem with my phone or shopping because COVID has just pushed these awful habits to an extreme level.

Identify and reflect on two micro-moments during the day and describe your behaviour going through them.

The first micro-moment that comes into my mind is the I want to buy. What prompted me to the I want to buy micro-moment is that I’m honestly just always hungry. My life is just a consistent flow of seeking ways to not be hungry. Even though I’m always hungry, I somehow always forget to eat. It makes absolutely zero sense. I’ll spend my day doing assignments and homework and then it’ll be like 9 pm and at that point, I don’t want to actually cook anything. This means, that I pull out my phone and start looking at fast food places that deliver to me. The main problem with ordering on my phone is that there’s not one food delivery app that offers all the restaurants. Which leaves me with this, a folder dedicated to the food places I usually order from. Do I feel very good about this being an actual thing in my life? Absolutely not, it’s very embarrassing. It wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t using it all the time, but I do. Like almost on an every other day basis. I didn’t go into much detail earlier but, I like the TD app so much because when I get those paycheques I just think “Awesome, I have more money to spend on food.” Don’t let my extremely skinny physique fool you. There is a boy that loves food trapped inside me.

Another micro-moment that happens throughout my day would be the I want to know moments. I want to know moments focus on people who are looking for information on a topic without a specific business-related intention. An example of this micro-moment happening would be me looking up random thoughts and ideas that come into my head while doing homework. When I’m not overworking myself to the point of not eating food, I can be distracted very easily. The main thing that promotes me to research random things is due to procrastination. I have a theory that literally everything seems way more interesting when you have something boring to do. In most cases, the boring thing I have to do is write my notes for school. This leads me to look up random things on Google, that will eventually bring me down an endless rabbit hole of other random things I want to learn about. This will lead me to feel very annoyed with myself after an hour has passed and my homework still isn’t finished. With the final outcome of me having to spend more time doing homework and going to be late. 

Did you have any experiences with mobile ‘friction’ where something didn't work and/or pissed you off? Briefly describe it.

I don’t really experience any mobile ‘friction’ with my iPhone. It’s a pretty new iPhone and it works perfectly fine most of the time. There’s only been a handful of times when faceID refuses to work and I have to be a caveman and actually type in my pin to open my phone.

What is an insight you can extract from this user’s behaviour that’s important to share?

I think that the main insight that can be extracted from this user behaviour would be to learn your customer’s lifestyle patterns. Especially with a lot of people spending their days indoors, learning a customer’s daily pattern could be very beneficial in creating new ways to provide customers with a better user experience. I’m sure that a lot of my other classmates have Instagram as their most-used application. A brand can use this to their advantage and spend a lot of money focused on creating ads for Instagram since that will be the best way to reach customers. Since people aren’t commuting and taking public transit as often, these brands need to think of a new creative way to reach their audience. So putting a focus on understanding which apps customers use on a regular basis can get the most out of your advertising budget. Learning about how they use their phone on a daily basis and focusing on user experience can be key to generating a profit.

[joshuaduncan-blog1]

MARKETING SEMINAR SERIES #2

About 2 weeks ago, our marketing seminar class had the privilege of having Kareem Perez the Founder of the Tech Effect attend our lecture. It was very insightful to learn from a current digital marketer working in the field and hearing his first hand experiences. During his presentation Kareem focused on a lot of relevant topics that I feel that current students can really benefit from hearing. As a digital marketer Kareem focuses his talents in being a consultant, a speaker, an advice coach and just a general educator focused on helping others with digital media marketing. He currently works two positions, the first being a Digital Marketing consultant  for Higher Vision Media. This job entails helping  businesses strengthen their digital footprint with the use of storytelling, creation of content, experiences and strategic advertising. He applies social media solutions to complex business decisions. I found this very interesting and intriguing since that job really reflects what exactly I want to do in my career. It sounds like his job really focuses on the idea of building and creating strategies for the companies that he may work with. Being able to learn and gain wisdom from somebody who is currently in the direct field of work I want to be with was able to really open my eyes and give me a path of what I need to do to reach my goal. 

With Kareem’s presentation he really focused on the non school related skills that are needed to find a job. Some of the key points and ideas that he touched on were standing out from the crowd and essentially  always putting yourself in the best position to be successful. He said that we can’t wait to kick start our career. This basically means that we can’t just be waiting around for an opportunity to present itself to us. We have to take the necessary steps for an opportunity to present itself. One thing I’ve heard countless times from the conferences that I have attended were people saying that they got lucky and were just in the right spot at the right time. And yeah, that does play a role for some people that they just technically get lucky, but you have to put yourself in a position to get lucky. That’s something that never really clicked in my head until recently and after I have heard a couple of our presenters talk about being prepared.  This idea was also something Kareem talked about in his presentation about always learning even after you finish school. With marketing being such a fast paced environment and always updating, it’s very important for us as marketers to always be in the know and stay updated with whether it’s the newest software or the newest trends in the market. Finally, Mr. Perez spoke about visualizing our future goals, writing down and measuring our progress and pushing through completion. Doing these tasks will provide you with a better sense of what direction you want to go in. It’s easy for us to say what we want to do but things change and happen in our lives that can make us lose sight of our goals. Being able to write down what we want to accomplish in our lives gives us a great sense of direction and the steps needed to reach them.

Kareem’s presentation really provided me with more of a focus and gave me a sense of what I need to do to put myself in the best position to succeed. Even though this program will provide me with the skills I need to get a job in a marketing position, there are still other things I should and need to do to accomplish my personal goals. I think that I will reach out to Kareem to set up an appointment so I can get a more personal look at what I should do to reach my personal goals. I personally think that Kareem gave the best presentation so far for this class and I really hope that our future guests give us some very useful insight on how we can better prepare ourselves for the future.

[joshuaduncan-blog1]

Seminar Series #1

Provide an overview on what the speakers said

For our first marketing seminar, we had the privilege of having three past George Brown Alumni from the Digital Media Marketing program attend our lecture. It was very insightful to learn and talk to past students from our program and be able to see where they are in their careers and how much the program and their co-op was able to guide them and help them find jobs. The three speakers that we had were Asta Schouten, Natasha Burtenshaw-de-Vrie and Jordan Veenstra. Asta spoke a lot about what her job entails and all the marketing aspects for her duty at work. With her past creative background in Graphic Design she was able to merge it with her digital marketing degree. With her being the Social Media Manager at CCS, her job entails various aspects of marketing from the creation of social media content to requests for proposals. Both Natasha and Jordan currently work for agencies and do similar jobs that involve SEO. However, both of them were able to give different viewpoints on their work due to the size of their agencies. A general overview of what all three of these speakers spoke about is how much of what they learned at George Brown was able to direct them into their current career paths. From the Digital Media Certification program, all three of them were able to explore very different aspects of marketing based on the classes they had previously taken. I feel like a lot of what the speakers said really resonated with me. All three of them spoke about how much of an  impact networking had on starting their careers. Obviously the importance of networking has been a recurring theme throughout my time in George Brown, but hearing how all three of them were able to get their jobs due to their connections really spoke out to me. It’s easy for people to tell you to do something but I personally feel like it does not carry as much weight until you hear it from somebody that has actually been in a similar experience as you. To continue, they also spoke about how  the program covers a variety of topics, they were able to pick which aspects of marketing they enjoyed the most and tailored their job search for their co-op for those specific jobs. In general, each speaker spoke about their experiences and what led them to their current jobs. 

Talk about what you learned from the speaker

One of the main takeaways I got from the speakers came from the questions that were asked towards the end of the class. A couple of my classmates asked some very interesting questions. One question that stood out the most was about being able to apply a design aspect when creating marketing content without having a background education in design. I felt that Asta made a very good point about it. She essentially said that you don’t have to be an expert in it, but if it’s something that you are interested in there are steps and online programs that are in place to learn different design softwares. Companies can look past employees not being perfect at every aspect of the job, but if they have a good foundation there’s still a possibility of them getting the job. I felt like this was really important to hear, but as marketers it feels like we need to be terrific and all aspects of marketing whether it's the creative side or the number side. Sometimes it feels hard to be able to be all those things at once. However, we don’t need to be all of those things at the same time. We can take our time and learn these different skills while still perfecting other necessary skills in marketing to allow us to be well-rounded marketers. 

Furthermore, I asked a question about how the work life balance is when working at an agency and I was able to get two different types of answers. Natasha currently works at a much smaller agency than Jordan so she said there hasn’t been much of a compromise with her personal life and her work life. She is able to leave at 4:30 most days. Jordan on the other hand spoke about how when working at a large agency it is very true that there are going to be a handful of days when you’re working very late into the night. He spoke about how it’s not as bad as it may seem on television shows make it out to be. It definitely happens and you will have to make certain life adjustments to it. But, it is very much doable. 

Reflect on how this may impact their career path

After hearing past George Brown students talk about their current career it left me wondering where I wanted to go in my own personal career. As somebody who wants to focus on marketing in either a sports or agency setting. I feel as though both options may lead to difficult decisions with my personal life and my work life. In a perfect world, I would be able to balance both of them perfectly without any trouble. However, I’ve come to realize that either one of these jobs may not consume my total life, but there will be times where I'll have to make hard decisions in my personal life or that I might miss out on an event due to work. I’m currently trying to find a possible solution to this problem. As somebody that what’s to have kids in the future, I do not want to miss out on quality time with them because I am stuck working so late at my job. I had always pictured myself working for a large agency like Don Draper in Mad Men. Even though a common theme of his character is that he chooses his work over family, I do not want to end up like that. I’m beginning to believe that working at a smaller agency will provide me more peace of mind in both aspects of my life while still feeling accomplished in my professional life.