Associate Professor Jay Newell has had a busy summer:
In teaching, he received the American Advertising Federation’s Distinguished Advertising Educator Award. He accepted the award at the AAF’s annual meeting in Anaheim and took advantage of the LA trip to visit ad alums such as Donavon Davenport (now doing product placement for Porsche and Carhart) and Nick Hammack (copywriter for Deustch. Those new Sprint ads featuring the “can you hear me know guy” are his). He also was the recipient of the AEJMC Advertising Division’s Distinguished Teaching Award. “As much as I appreciate the awards,” he stated, “I appreciate more the support for the applications that came from Greenlee, especially Michael, students, alumni and the Iowa advertising and design community.”
Also in teaching, Newell discussed our Computational Communication: Ad Creative course on a joint AEJMC Ad Division/PR Division panel on teaching digitally. “As far as I know, Greenlee is the first school to offer a course in ads that adapt the creative based on real-time incoming data,” he wrote. “This course couldn’t have happened without the intense work of Sherry Berghefer and computer science’s Pak Tavanapong.”
“Classes are off to a good start this semester,” Newell added. His Ad Media (Advrt 335) class is working with the Des Moines Register’s Investigative Reports unit, feeding the Register data on the amount of presidential TV ad buys in Iowa. And the Ad Principles course has already met via the Wednesday Wake Up Call Skypes with ad alums Liz Sener (media planner in Austin), Laurin Garen (accounts, MSP) and Jacob Bofferding (copywriter, Chi). “Based on feedback from internships where students reported needing more info on agency roles and job titles, we’re focusing more on the who-does-what this semester, especially at the early-career levels.
In scholarship, Newell presented a paper on the effects of saturation advertising buys by presidential candidates during the 2016 Iowa Caucuses. The $46 million that was spent in the year leading up to the caucuses didn’t buy much in the way of votes, but markets that saw more advertising were more likely to see changes in candidate preferences over time.
And in service, he was the discussant for a social media session at AEJMC, chaired a university-level performance review committee for the Provost’s office, reviewed a manuscript for the Journal of Advertising Education, and conducted a tenure review for a Big 10 university.