Student Report: Alumna Exposes Marketing Club to the World of Digital Marketing

Student Author: Dillan Sant ’21

Earlier this week, alumna Deena Sant ’11 spoke to the Marketing Club to talk about her career path, giving the club a glimpse into the world of digital marketing.

After graduating from MICDS in 2011, Deena attended Wake Forest University where she studied business enterprise management with a concentration in marketing. In 2015, she began working for Merkle, a global performance marketing agency, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Deena is now an Associate Director at Merkle currently working from the firm’s office in New York City. With Merkle, Deena has worked with clients such as Facebook and BET.

Deena spoke to the group about digital marketing—what it is and why it is becoming more significant in our lives—and she talked about audience targeting and the process of building a media plan. While social media and the internet continue to become more integral parts of our society, digital marketing is continuously becoming more prevalent as companies seek to reach as many prospective consumers as possible. Also, digital marketing has been gaining ground on print advertising since it is much easier to produce and can reach many more targeted consumers. As social media networks continue to expand, digital marketing presents a highly-strategic tactic for businesses and marketing agencies.

Deena explained another benefit of digital marketing as opposed to print advertising: the fact that the data for digital ads is easily measurable. Agencies such as Merkle can view the number of impressions, clicks, and orders that resulted from a given ad via tracking codes that are placed within the ads. This data is a crucial indicator of the level of effectiveness of an ad and helps people like Deena make decisions about future advertisements.

Perhaps the most interesting topic of Deena’s presentation was her description of how audience targeting worked and how it is utilized. Truly, everything that internet users do online is tracked, whether it is by social media companies like Facebook or search engines like Google. These companies compile data on what we view and then link the users to an advertisement that meets their taste. Deena described an example of two people visiting the same webpage at the same time, yet each person seeing different ads in front of them due to their previous history of browsing the web. Companies perform audience targeting in order to increase the likelihood that a viewer of their ad will purchase the good or service they are selling. Some companies have been sued for audience targeting, specifically through the collection of user data since it could be considered an invasion of privacy, but hearing from Deena, someone who works closely with targeting and data collection, assured the club that this data is only collected to better match consumers with producers.

The Marketing Club enjoyed Deena’s presentation, and it was fun for me to hear a presentation from my sister. Thank you, Deena!