Faculty – SMU Advertising

March 24, 2022

Professor Nicole Haddad Earns Business Leadership Teaching Excellence Award

Temerlin Professor Shares Corporate Experience with SMU Cox Students

Nicole Haddad, Founder and CEO of ArtWorks, presented a seminar titled Grow Your Confidence to Achieve Limitless Possibilities on March 9, 2022, as part of the Edwin L. Cox Business Leadership Center’s programming for Cox MBA students. Through the BLC, Cox graduate students gain insight into various facets of business leadership. BLC instructors are business leaders drawn from prominent national and international companies who come to the SMU campus to share their extensive knowledge with Cox students. BLC Instructors include representatives from ArtWorks, Accenture, Bank of Texas, PepsiCo, Texas Instruments, and many more. Although no class credit is given for attendance, students consistently rate what they have learned from BLC instructors as extremely valuable, and many students say that the BLC was a major factor in their decision to pursue business.

Nicole Haddad earned a Business Leadership Teaching Excellence Award for her presentation, which means that the students attending rated the seminar as a 4.8 or higher out of a possible “perfect” rating of 5.

For additional information on the BLC, visit http://www.cox.smu.edu/web/blc/blc ###

The Business Leadership Center at the Cox School of Business, SMU Kate Hoedebeck, Director

April 22, 2021April 22, 2021

Dr. Carrie La Ferle Recognized for Career Promoting Advertising Ethics and Social Responsibility

Dr. Carrie La Ferle of the Temerlin Advertising Institute at Southern Methodist University was awarded the prestigious Kim Rotzoll Award for Advertising Ethics and Social Responsibility. The award has only been given nine times since 2004 with La Ferle following the likes Ivan L Preston (2005), Herbert Jack Rotfeld (2006), Richard W. Pollay (2007), Wally Snyder (2009), Les Carlson (2010), Meme Drumwright (2013), Jerome Williams (2018) and Kim Sheehan (2019). Carrie said she was honored and absolutely beaming with gratitude to be included among these esteemed colleagues.

Kim Rotzoll spearheaded the teaching and research of ethics in advertising, from media ethics to the study of advertising as a social and economic institution in society. He was Dean of the College of Communications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for over ten years and prior to that, head of the department of advertising, one of the best ranked research advertising programs in the country. Kim died in 2003 at the age sixty-eight and the award was created to recognize individuals demonstrating an outstanding commitment to advertising ethics and social responsibility.

Dr. La Ferle was praised for….over twenty years of teaching ethics in advertising to undergraduate and graduate students, contributing to the design and now thriving MA in Advertising program at TAI with social responsibility at its core, her outstanding contribution to research, and her continued active service to the profession nationally and internationally, promoting teaching and research in ethics and social responsibility in advertising.

The American Academy of Advertising is the top advertising organization for advertising scholars interested in advertising research and education. It oversees many advertising journals, including the premier journal in the field, the Journal of Advertising.

April 20, 2021

Faculty Highlights: 2021 Conference of the American Academy of Advertising

During the annual American Academy of Advertising conference held virtually from March 18-20, 2021, Dr. Quan Xie of SMU’s Temerlin Advertising Institute captivated a global audience with her research titled, “Advocating Corporate Social Responsibility in these Uncertain Times of Covid-19? The Moderating Effect of Threat Persuasion in CSR Advertising.” Dr. Xie also is an active member of the AAA Membership Committee, helping to interact and grow the existing membership, currently located across 20+ countries.

Contributing to this growth, Dr. Sid Muralidharan and Dr. Carrie La Ferle joined in meetings with their Global & Multicultural Committee members to foster research and teaching across a broad range of local, national, and international cultural issues.

Distinguished Chair, Professor of Advertising and Director of the Temerlin Advertising Institute, Dr. Steven M. Edwards was also front and center at the American Academy of Advertising Conference, being thanked for his past service as Treasurer on AAA’s Executive Committee, continued support of doctoral research awards.

March 5, 2021March 22, 2021

Winning the Big iDea Takes More than Just a Great Idea!

A chance meeting while working in the hall at ULEE, SMU Psychology student and Neuroscience Lab Research Coordinator Madison McMahan met Advertising Professor Dr. Carrie La Ferle. After several conversations, they got to know each other. Recently, Madison shared her Big iDeas business idea: Panacea!

More than Instagram or Facebook. More than a dating app. Panacea helps people easily make friends based on shared interests and hobbies.

Taking cues from the world of advertising , Dr. La Ferle gave Madison some general ideas to consider for making a winning “pitch and presentation” on her Big iDeas Business Competition pitch.

After her Panacea idea won, Madison shared her enjoyment of the Big iDeas journey and learning how to start a business. “I had such wonderful encouragement from my family, friends, the Engaged Learning Team and SMU faculty Carrie La Ferle, Bruce Snider, and Carlos Martinez! This experience has given me huge insights into marketing, planning, advertising concepts, and the overall business world. The skills I have gained will help me in the future, especially with the things that I am super passionate about such as helping people find friends.”

Madison plans to launch the app in July and hopes everyone to be able to join Panacea to form new friendships.

To find out more about Panacea, or to be notified when the app is ready, please visit the website or email panaceaconnectionisgood@gmail.com.

Congratulations Madison and to the other 2021 Big iDeas Business Plan winners!

Find out more about Engaged Learning and Big iDeas at SMU.

February 23, 2021February 24, 2021

ALUMNI UPDATE: Leveraging Graduate Education in the Industry

Temerlin alumna Deja Sanders is a global account supervisor at TracyLocke’s Chicago office. She credits her experience in Temerlin’s graduate program with facilitating her pivot into the advertising industry. “Completing my M.A. at Temerlin in 2018 was hands-down the best decision for my career. Not only was I able to stretch myself academically, but I was also able to tap into a wealth of creative resources from the Dallas area and across the world,” she says.

Sanders also credits challenging conversations with professors and colleagues that taught her how to navigate the clients she manages today. “The care and commitment to TAI students and their professional development is something that I will always appreciate,” she says.

“When I reflect on the tools and theories taught throughout this program, I can honestly say that I deploy many of them on a day-to-day basis. Beyond client relationships and good creative, advertising at its foundation is a psychographic tool leveraged to communicate across communities. Understanding these communities and what makes them tick is where my educational training intersects with my day-to-day role,” Sanders adds. She cites Dr. Sid Muralidharan’s graduate course, Advertising as a Cultural Force, as an impactful learning experience. Sanders studied how advertisers represent and communicate authentically with multicultural and international audiences. She aspires to continue these studies through a Ph.D. in advertising; her goal is to increase research and identify additional tools of engagement for multicultural and international audiences.

February 18, 2021February 24, 2021

FACULTY SPOTLIGHT: Difficult Year. Difficult Briefs. Smart Solutions.

Throughout his career, Temerlin professor Dr. Mark Allen has worked as an art director and designer for clients including the History Channel, the New York Yankees, Norton/Symantec, Martha Stewart, The Walking Dead, A&E Networks, HBO, the U.S. National Parks Service and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. His work has been recognized for creative excellence in the Print Regional Design Annual and Applied Arts magazine and by the Promotion Marketing Association, the Illustrators Society of Los Angeles and the Dallas Society of Visual Communications. He joined SMU’s newly established Temerlin Advertising Institute in 2003, where he currently teaches various creative advertising courses. Allen recently shared his insights into his students’ work and the shift in teaching creative courses brought about by the pandemic.

“I knew that teaching creative studio-based classes virtually was going to be a challenge, but it was much harder than I anticipated. It was difficult to hold our weekly critiques—the lifeblood of our creative classes—on Zoom because we’re used to walking around the room, making notes, and drawing sketches on the work that plasters every available surface in the classroom. Losing the spatial, tactile dimension of what we do in the classroom was felt every time we met online. Additionally, there’s usually a lot of back-and-forth with the students. But humor and sarcastic banter are hard to pull off on Zoom when most of the class is on mute. More than anything, I miss hearing the flood of input from my students during a critique. They are so smart and so funny, and I depend on their eyes, ears and brains to back me up—and to challenge my ill-advised suggestions. Zoom only allows you to focus on one thing at a time: one voice, one image, etc. And I don’t usually run my classes like that,” Allen explains.

Continue reading “FACULTY SPOTLIGHT: Difficult Year. Difficult Briefs. Smart Solutions.”

February 11, 2021February 22, 2021

Temerlin’s Take on Super Bowl Spots

Leading up to Sunday’s Super Bowl, Executive-in-Residence Amber Benson spoke with CBS 11 regarding her expectations for this year’s ads. In the interview, Benson noted that Super Bowl staples such as Budweiser, Coke and Pepsi chose to sit out the game, which provided space for newer and smaller brands to play. Benson accurately anticipated more humor in this year’s ads, explaining that advertisers know people needed a comedic break this year. What we didn’t expect to see was the humorous Oatly CEO singing off-key in a field, alone.

Professor Mark Allen agrees with Benson’s insights, citing GM’s “No Way Norway” with Will Ferrell as a big winner of the night. “This one had all the ingredients of a classic Super Bowl commercial: big-budget, big celebrities, big laughs. But this spot was much smarter than it may seem on the surface. Instead of interrupting the big game with a drive-by guilting about carbon emissions, fossil fuels and global warming, GM kept us laughing with an appeal to American patriotism and our competitive spirit. But this time it was all in the service of selling electric vehicles (without taking a cheap shot at gas-guzzling muscle cars). And Will Ferrell was perfect for this one—hilarious,” Allen explains.

Temerlin’s Ad Club organized a socially distant ad viewing party on February 10 and invited LERMA/ agency’s Brian Linder and Bill Cochran to share their creative insights with students. Temerlin senior Sarah Scambray helped organize the event. She says, “I’m so glad we were able to host an in-person event because it allowed everyone to see one another’s reactions as we watched the ads and discuss them openly afterward. It was a great break from the impersonal nature of meeting on Zoom. We also invited a couple of industry professionals to give their take, and it was really cool to hear their in-depth perspective on which ads were truly successful or not.”

Ad Club’s mission is to create a student community of those with an interest in and passion for advertising. The club offers agency and advertising-inspired events, career-building workshops and professional panels that give students the opportunity to learn about the advertising industry, develop the necessary skills to earn internships and jobs, and network with fellow students, alumni and industry professionals. To learn more about Ad Club or join, please contact Ad Club President Meredith Welborn at mjwelborn@smu.edu.

February 9, 2021February 22, 2021

Advertising Professor Collaborates With Researchers to Study Homelessness

Willie Baronet, the Stan Richards Professor in Creative Advertising, has been buying and collecting homeless signs since 1993. The meaningful conversations Baronet had with the homeless when purchasing signs led to the founding of his not-for-profit We Are All Homeless. Through this organization, Baronet enlists volunteers and students to advocate for the homeless by organizing awareness-building events, including exhibits of collected signs and gathering donations.

In collaboration with a We Are All Homeless 2018 event, Baronet worked alongside researchers from Thomas Jefferson University’s Public Health Department and its director, Dr. Rosemary Frasso, to study the lived experiences of unhoused people who panhandle and their interactions with passersby. “I am so proud that I’ve been able to partner with Dr. Frasso to bring art and science together to create meaningful research to impact the homeless cause,” says Baronet. “Working with her students, and subsequently being a co-author to their research, is something I didn’t expect to be doing. The TAI slogan is Better Advertising. Better World. and the Meadows motto is Start a Movement. I hope that this work can be an example to our students who want to take the lessons we teach about creativity and purpose and find ways to make them a reality.”

Their resulting paper, ‘Even a smile helps’: Exploring the Interactions Between People Experiencing Homelessness and Passersby in Public Spaces, was published in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry this January. Forty semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants who were approached while panhandling and asked to describe their experiences asking for help in public and accessing homelessness services, as well as what they wished to share with those passing by. Participants’ experiences were consistent with loneliness, as characterized in the literature as distress at lack of social connection, and were also notable for the verbal and physical violence endured in public spaces. Many shared personal histories of tragedy and called for greater empathy and compassion from passersby, as well as society as a whole, for people experiencing homelessness. The researchers said that because social isolation and trauma are detrimental to mental health in this vulnerable group, interventions to support this population should provide opportunities for consistent, supportive social connections and focus on providing low-barrier, stable housing.

Dr. Frasso, the organizing researcher, adds, “This collaboration helped us both grow as scholars and educators. Working with colleagues outside your home discipline is powerful and together we were able to shed light on the lives of people experiencing homelessness, through art (the amazing exhibit we held at Jefferson) and through traditional public health channels, such as peer-reviewed literature.”

December 9, 2020December 9, 2020

FACULTY RESEARCH: Graduate Student Co-Authors Article with Temerlin Faculty

Dr. Sid Muralidharan, associate professor, and Dr. Carrie La Ferle, Marriott Endowed Professor of Ethics and Culture, have been researching the effectiveness of domestic violence messaging on bystander reporting. Last fall, Dr. Sid invited Temerlin graduate student Lauren Howard to join their research for a third study exploring domestic violence prevention messaging.

The first two studies explore the outward-facing emotional response to ad messaging. The first study, published in the Journal of Advertising, compares guilt and shame ad appeals. A subsequent study published in the Journal of Nonprofit and Public Sector Marketing focuses on opposing emotional ad appeals – shame versus hope. Between both these studies, hope is found to be the more effective emotion in motivating bystanders to intervene. The most recent study, which Howard co-authored alongside Dr. Sid and Dr. La Ferle for Social Marketing Quarterly, pivots inward to compare the effects of guilt and hope messaging in relation to “independent self-construal,” the extent to which people view themselves as separate and distinct from others. Those with high independent self-construal are more apt to promote themselves positively and tend to be driven and have high self-esteem. In contrast, people with low independent self-construal tend to be less ambitious with lower self-esteem. Findings reveal that hope messaging engages both low and high independent self-construal, whereas guilt messaging pushes those with low self-construal to distance themselves from potential bystander intervention.

“Through this independent study, I learned a lot about how we are still facing the impact of patriarchal societies’ dominance in many cultures worldwide,” says Howard. “This is important as it affects how people see, feel, and act upon domestic violence and the advertisements associated with bystander intervention. It is crucial that advertisers pay attention to what emotion resonates with consumers and encourages action when creating ads to promote bystander intervention.”

Temerlin faculty engage graduate students through a variety of work such as case studies, primary and secondary research, and agency internships to ensure students have exposure to the vast array of disciplines within the advertising industry. Learn more about Temerlin’s graduate program here.