The Akron Legal News

New OSU course to cover digital marketing

RICK ADAMCZAK
Special to the Legal News
Published: April 24, 2012

Due to new technologies and even new media, companies’ marketing teams have to use a much different strategy to reach potential customers today than they did even just a decade ago.

In fact, with so many media choices today for consumers — newspapers, television, the Internet, social media, to name a few — one of the biggest obstacles for marketing professionals is reaching potential customers who are in increasingly fragmented audiences, said Mike Bills, executive director of Ohio State University’s Innovation Initiative team that teaches students about today’s challenges in brand marketing and business innovation.

“You have to constantly be changing, proactive, because reaching customers today is so much harder. They’re all over the place with many different touch points,” said Bills, who worked for many years in the business world before joining OSU’s Fisher College of Business.

He said today’s consumers behave as if they’re part of a bigger community when interacting with media.

“It’s much more complex than it was 30 or 40 years ago. The customer journey is quite different, more individual,” said Bills.

This spring, the Innovation Initiative has launched a unique MBA course to teach students about digital marketing.

Participating in the teaching of the course, Digital Marketing, is Resource Interactive, one of the nation’s top-rated digital marketing agencies.

“It’s rare for business colleges to engage business into developing a course,” said Bills.

The course provides students with skills to develop and execute strategies and tactics associated with cross-channel marketing in today’s digital age.

Senior management from Resource Interactive will teach most of classes, including Resource Interactive’s CEO Kelly Mooney and Nita Rollins, the agency innovation consultant and director of thought leadership.

Mooney and Rollins are also the authors of the primary course text, “The OPEN Brand-When Push Comes to Pull in a Web-Made World.”

Nancy Kramer, Resource Interactive’s founder and chief culture officer and a graduate of OSU, said this type of relationship, between an agency and a university, is the first of its kind.

“(W)hat is truly unique about this course is that the nationally renowned agency Resource Interactive and its founder and Chief Culture Officer Nancy Kramer are partnering with Fisher to teach and offering their company and strategy as key components of the curriculum,” said Bills.

Students will learn various techniques related to analytics and marketing research, strategy formulation, design, development of marketing tactics, such as web and mobile strategies for e-commerce.

“A lot of business courses aren’t focused on proactive growth,” said Bills. “When you are trying to grow your business you’re trying to find new markets, products ... in this day and age the best companies, regardless of their age, have very sophisticated e-commerce strategies.”

In-classroom instruction will take place at Resource Interactive’s headquarters in the Nationwide Arena District, but the majority of the course instruction will happen online in modules developed in partnership with Bills, Fisher Educational Technologies team and Resource Interactive.

Students will work on team projects and engage in online team discussions and study cases from Harvard Business Review.

Bills, the long-time private sector professional, said he’s embracing his role as an educator.

“I was a practitioner ... and now I have the opportunity to pass that knowledge along to the students,” said Bills, who prior to joining OSU was managing partner for the Americas at international consulting firm Fitch.

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