Episode Transcript

W&L After Class

With Guest Amanda Bower

Episode Transcript

Ruth Candler 
Welcome to W&L After Class, The Lifelong Learning Podcast. I'm your host, Ruth Candler.

A special welcome to those of you who are joining us for the first time and a sincere thank you to those of you who have been with us from the beginning. We have many fascinating conversations with our W&L faculty this season. If you subscribe to our W&L After Class Podcast, you'll be sure to never miss an episode.

Today's guest is Amanda Bower, head of W&L’s Business Administration department. Amanda is the Charles C. Holbrooke, Jr. Professor of Business Administration and joined the W&L Faculty in July 2002. She teaches courses in marketing management, creative strategic planning and also integrated marketing communications, widely known across campus as “ad class”. Her research focuses on consumer perception of spokespeople in advertising, corporate social responsibility, product instructions and product return policies.

Professor Bower is particularly interested in the relationship between the liberal arts and business environment emphasizing an interdisciplinary approach in her courses. She played a key role in revising W&L’s business major, integrating liberal arts courses into the curriculum. She also developed W&L’s ad lib conference emphasizing the relationship between liberal arts and advertising. Amanda was the first woman to receive tenure in the department.

Amanda, we are so excited to have you here today. Thanks for joining us.

Amanda Bower 
Thanks for having me.

Ruth Candler
So I just mentioned your popular ad class, which you began teaching in 2003. What exactly is ad class?

Amanda Bower
What is this thing? So we participate in the National Student Advertising competition which is the supposed, the premier advertising competition in the United States. We recruit students from across campus. So we try to get a, you know, a diversity of different majors and minors and skill sets and interests.

We usually end up with between 18 and 20 different majors and minors represented in the class. And it's not, it's not just business majors plus something else, it's double majors in art history and sociology or double majors in you know, math and strat com or something. So it's, it's a real diversity of majors from across campus. What we do is we work on an advertising campaign, we get a real case and a real client and we start from scratch and we come up with, you know what we believe is the best campaign that we can come up with in eight short weeks or something like that. It is in the winter term, it's a four-week course now. So anybody who took this class a few years ago and remembers when it was a three week course, they've all currently went “finally.” It is highly experiential and the students are organized in an ad agency like structure. So they all have different kinds of responsibilities and work on different parts at different times to create the overall campaign.

Ruth Candler 
So you mentioned that it went from three credits to four credits and that it has 18-20 majors and minors. How has it evolved since you began, other than those two things?

Amanda Bower
So the first time I taught it in winter of 20-2003? God what year? Um, 2003. So it was my first year here and we listed it as Integrated Marketing Communication because that's sort of the standard way that you would list a class like this at the time. And I team taught it with somebody else who was on the faculty here at that time. And it was a normal class, you know, came in and did lectures and then kind of pulled together something at the end. We went to the competition and we did, I mean incredibly well. We came in second.

Ruth Candler 
Wow, that’s impressive.  

Amanda Bower
It was an amazing introduction to what W&L students can do. It was an incredible experience for me to be able to see all that. And so over time, you know, you get to the end of the year and you go, okay, what did I learn? What could be done better? How can we change, how can we improve? And so over time it's evolved from sort of a normal class with a group project to, you know, there are multiple groups that have very specific and defined responsibilities. We've had multiple groups added over time. So there's, you know, people who are in charge of analytics, there are people who are in charge of just coming up with the book that we submit, there are people who are in charge of media and in charge of coming up with what the brand strategy should be, the ad strategy. So it's evolved into multiple different kinds of groups. We also now have an advisor system. So there are a select small group of students who took the class the year before are selected to serve as advisors the next year and they take ad class in leadership in a creative industry. They're learning some skills that they're then applying to the students in the current year. So it's evolved into a sort of sort of Kraken-like object with lots of arms that has to be managed. But it ends up in a situation where the students are able to take responsibility for something that is within their skill set but still reaching out to students working on other things to make connections. 

Ruth Candler
So it sounds like it began as a typical class and has evolved into really what looks like an advertising agency and all components of what would encompass an advertising agency. 

Amanda Bower
To the extent that we are able to create that in, you know, winter term. 

Ruth Candler
In a few weeks. 

Amanda Bower
In a few weeks to the extent that we are able to do that. But you know, it's interesting because, so it started off as integrated marketing communications. We started for reasons of both affection, and efficiency started to call it ad class but then what we found was it was really more like consulting but with communication solutions, you know, a lot of what goes on in advertising is we already have a strategy, you know. Like look at Geico, right? So they're still kind of running some of the same, you know, they still have the gecko and they are still running those things. And in fact, you know recently they brought up a new, you know, they brought up their best of, right? We started to see the caveman again and that's not what this is, this is we have a very specific problem and we need you to solve it. And so you know the philosophy that we take in the class, and I say “we” because you know I work every year very closely with the advisers to kind of figure out how do we want to iterate, what do we want to improve, what kind of new skills do we want to make sure we have, what kind of specialties do we want to emphasize? So we really think of it as like consulting with communication solutions. And we've had, we had a string there of a lot of students who are graduating and going and working at Deloitte or in fact I think 4/5 of the advisors from last year are all going into consulting and the other one is backpacking across Alaska. 

Ruth Candler
Great experience.

Amanda Bower
That's what I'm thinking. I'm like so she wins. Yeah. 

Ruth Candler 
Well you and your students have worked with some very large and very familiar companies over the years. Can you identify some of those companies and would you walk us through the process of how you have your class create an advertising strategy for them?

Amanda Bower 
The campaigns that we get for ad class are given to us by the N.S.A.C., the competition. And so you know over the years it's been Pizza Hut and Ocean Spray, Snapple. Mary Kay was a really interesting one because half the class was men. So that was you know, there was a lot of explaining of you know, the sticky thing goes around your eye, the brushy thing goes on your eyelashes and so that was kind of interesting. But it was also incredibly valuable because there are a few things you have to do when you're when you're doing advertising or anything dealing with consumers is you have to think about it as even if you think you're in the in the target market, you can't think that way. Like you have to have a certain level of kind of third position, triangulation, objectivity, otherwise you know you're going to sit there and go “Well I would never like this.” 

Ruth Candler
Which the men did in the Mary Kay. 

Amanda Bower
Well and the men, yeah, the men really offered that, you know where they're going, “well, why?” You know, they were helping us question assumptions, which is incredibly valuable to say, “well, why, why is it this way? Why does it have to be that way?” And it was, it was incredibly valuable to come up with a new solution. So you know, one of the, going back to the question of how do you start a campaign? One of the things that we do, we start off with is we start with what are the kind of clichés and commonalities and you know, things that we're seeing lots and lots of in campaigns and what we're seeing with what other competitors are doing. And so when it was like Snapple and Ocean Spray, we looked at lots and lots of advertising for say like fruit juice or drinks.  And one of the things that we identified pretty quickly was splashes. If you look at a juice ad, you'll see a splash. It'll either be a, you know, a splash coming out of the fruit or splash coming out of the glass or, so you'll identify the splashes. And so we're going, “no splashes unless we're gonna make fun of them.” Like we're going to go meta splash or no splash. Like those are our two choices. With the cosmetics what was really was so, so interesting was when you look at the, the clichés in cosmetic ads, it's always like the cosmetic is front and center. The cosmetic is, is the most important thing and the woman is glamorous. And sometimes, you know, one of the things we identified was the black background, which is how you advertise Godiva. You know, when you have this black background, it's very luxurious. And so we looked at these things and it's, you know, the makeup, the cosmetic is the is the center of your world and your beauty is the center of your world and how well you can do a smoky eye, which there's three people in the world who can do a smoky eye, and so we said, okay, what if we went in a very different direction? You know, instead of the people who watch YouTube video after YouTube video after YouTube video trying to figure out how to do a smoky eye, which give up, what we realized, and the men who were in the sort of the consumer, the consumer research and strategy piece of it were incredibly valuable because they helped us get to this position of, well, you know, think about how most women put on their makeup most of the time and it's you put on your makeup and then you get on with the rest of your day. Like I got things to do. And so I got to get my makeup on and you're checking your phone to make sure you know what time it is because you got to get the hell out of the house. And so you also have to look at the brand right? So not just understanding consumers, not just understanding, understanding the competitors, but also understanding your brand. So when we first started looking at Mary Kay and if you google an image search of Mary Kay, one of the images that will show up is this older woman, Mary Kay herself. And we, we looked at her and we thought, well our target market is supposed to be these younger women, this is not necessarily somebody that we're going to be able to, they're gonna be able to identify with. So we kind of initially thought of her as a problem. But then what we realized was she was doing this because she was in like bad marriage after a bad marriage, I can't remember, it's been a couple years, and she kind of started this company herself and figured it all out and was very plucky and we found, we eventually found a much younger picture of herself with her dog and we thought that's our woman, you know, this woman who also is busy. I gotta get up, I got stuff to do. You know, to question the assumptions that we were making about the brand, question the assumptions that you would maybe make about the product, the category. Identifying clichés in the, in the marketplace, it was an incredibly valuable experience. One of the things that we talk about in ad class, even though it's called ad class and even though it's technically listed in the registrar as Integrated Marketing Communication is I tell the students that the class is really about two things, that it's about creativity and teamwork. That it's about having an original idea and working with other people to develop that original idea or to foster an environment where that original idea can be born and it just happens to be applied to advertising. And so it's a, it's a constant questioning and identifying, okay, what's the box that we're in and how do we kind of work our way to a new interesting space. 

Ruth Candler 
So Amanda, this sounds, it sounds absolutely fascinating. Is there a way that we can view the work that's been done by the students and by your classes?

Amanda Bower 
So this is a good news, bad news situation. So one of the very cool things about this opportunity is that we end up with a lot of inside information, you know, we end up with inside sales figures or we end up with proprietary research. And that's all really cool, but it also means we can't publish it. 

Ruth Candler 
Understandable. 

Amanda Bower
But I mean, but it does go into the portfolio, the students are allowed to, you know, share and discuss it in their job interviews. And so it's a nice experience too because students you know, think about job interview--tell me about a time you've worked with the team, tell me about a time when you failed. And, you know, creativity and teamwork is a lot of failure, right? It's like, here's my idea. Everybody goes, that's great, can you try this? And then you have to go back and try it again and try it again and try it again, not from the sense of big f failure, but small i- iteration, right? Improvement, improvement, improvement, improvement. And so it gives them groundwork for doing job interviews. And sometimes, you know, frankly, a less successful campaign can have really longer-term benefits. You know, it's the I think the Pat Conroy quote about people don't learn from success. They learn from failure, right? 

Ruth Candler
Right, exactly. 

Amanda Bower
Because he was on the basketball team at V.M.I. No, the other one—Citadel, sorry. He said, you know, once we lost that season, you never want to lose the way we lost that season so you just kind of sit and reflect on how can we not do this again? So, sometimes, you know, the really successful ones, you kind of think and reflect and what can I learn to take forward, especially if you're having to reflect for job interviews. But if something is less successful, either in the eyes of the judges or even in your own eyes, it gives you an opportunity to reflect, and because ultimately that's the goal, right? You know, where the students are at the end of the process, where the students are. 

Ruth Candler
Right.

Amanda Bower
Where the students are. 

Ruth Candler
Well, that's fair enough. So, maybe what we'll do on our show notes is list the companies that ad classes worked with over the years.

Amanda Bower
Sure. 

Ruth Candler
That would that would be fun to share. Sometimes companies need to change their branding. What are your thoughts about brands that are trying to overcome a negative reputation or change how they're perceived by a consumer?  

Amanda Bower 
So, there are a few things that are pretty cool. One is to look at what everybody else is doing, because you may be doing it too, you know, you may be chasing after, you may be looking at doing what everybody else is doing, and they're doing it, and you're like, well, it's working for them, I should do it too, and we see how well that worked for you know, Sears and Kmart trying to become Walmart. You know, that worked like a charm. So, that’s the first thing is to take stock of what's going on in the marketplace and figure out what is everybody else is doing, and then question some assumptions about what has to be done. Are those the things that have to be done? One of the things when we talk about it is creativity and teamwork. One of the models that that I talk about in class is--so when somebody tells you to be creative, what did they tell you to do? 

Ruth Candler
Brainstorm, think outside the box.

Amanda Bower
They tell you to think outside the box. Well what we do is we think inside the box, we define the box. Like what are the rules, what appear to be the rules? What appear to be the philosophies? You know? So if you look at Nike and so what's in the boxes? It's an athlete, it's a star athlete, it's you know, a Michael Jordan or a Tiger Woods. Sorry I'm Gen X, you're stuck with those. You know, it's gonna be the singular superhero kind of person, you're gonna throw 90 bajillion dollars at them. You too can be Michael Jordan, you too can you know like, think like Gatorade, right? Be like Mike. So you define that box and then you define all the walls of the box, what seem to be the rules of the game and then you take each side of that box and you start systematically thinking about, okay, do I need all of the walls on the box? Do I have to advertise on TV which is increasingly being questioned or another one is to think in an opposite way. If everybody's doing this, can I do something very, very different? So if everybody is hiring the star athlete which costs 90 bajillion dollars and also you end up with some, you know, not just the halo effect where you love Michael Jordan's so you'll love all the stuff he's associated with. But you can also end up with something called a horn effect, which is Tiger Woods in his various problematic lifestyle choices or whatever. Also, you can go in an opposite direction. So what is the opposite of the singular star hero in athletics? It's the team, right? It's one way of thinking about the opposite. And so when Under Armor was coming onto the market, they said that's the direction we're gonna go into. And so they had that “we must protect this house” at which was putting them in a very opposite space. And it carves out an appeal for the group of people who did not find what Nike was doing necessarily appealing, right. Another thing to think about is if your if your brand is in a bad space or in a kind of a disconnected space or an unappealing space or maybe not the greatest associations. A nice example of this is Domino's. So y'all will recall a few years ago that Domino's had that ad campaign, which was “we know you think our pizza is terrible” and everybody went “Indeed, I do. I do think your pizza's terrible. Congratulations.” The research is called a two-sided message where if you admit to some flaw, then you have some credibility that I'm willing to entertain so that when you tell me something else, I'm more willing to believe that too. So if you say, we know you think our pizza's terrible or Excedrin did this where they said, you know, for the aches and pains of everyday life take Tylenol, but for headaches you should take Excedrin even though Excedrin is basically what? Tylenol, aspirin, and a diet coke? Yeah, I'm like, I have all those available to me. I got two of those right there in that bag. So it's called a two sided message and but there is a real power in admitting something and then people are willing to buy in. So if you think about other brands that maybe have things to overcome, you know, Cadillac keeps showing us these guys dressed like Anderson Cooper, you know, on assignment, you know, tight black t shirts, driving cars really fast around the pacific coast highway and you know, powerful engines and all that. But when you ask somebody about, you know, what do you like still to this day, I ask students in class, what associations do you have to a Cadillac and I get grandpa, grandma, golf, you know, and that's not necessarily some divisions of things like rappers. People may have specific associations with a certain kind of Cadillac, but one possibility is especially as my generation gets older, good Lord, there may be a way of leaning into the truth that everybody already knows and then using that goodwill to have more credibility as you kind of move forward out of that, out of that space. So one interesting story. So the ad lib conference that you mentioned, we had a keynote speaker a few years ago, it was a man named Andrew Color. He graduated from W&L in the early 90s, I want to say 92, and he was working at the agency called Crispin Porter Bogusky that came up with that Domino's campaign. And when he was doing his keynote, one of the things he shared with us was that that Domino's campaign was in fact inspired by the honor system at W&L, which is pretty cool. 

Ruth Candler
Very cool. 

Amanda Bower
And it was it was the idea that in order to have credibility, you have to be honest. And so he said, so the more honest we are, the more credibility we will have. Now, he didn't say I woke up one day and Eureka and ran down the street, you know, and said, “thank God for my W&L education,” but more the idea of, you know, once you bake that, if you bake that into the system, right? I believe you because you're a part of a systematic approach to honesty and that was baked into his system. And so he said that, so I thought that was kind of cool. So every time you eat a Domino's pizza just know.  

Ruth Candler
That's a great story. 

Amanda Bower
Yeah. 

Ruth Candler
Thank you for sharing that. We talked about the fact that sometimes companies need to change their branding sometimes, but are there any brands out there right now that you feel are doing things right in terms of their marketing and advertising strategies? And are there any campaigns that have caught your eye recently as being especially successful? 

Amanda Bower
So I'm going to answer that question slightly differently, which is not to talk about any one campaign, but to talk about the approach that campaigns are having to take to reach consumers, which is one of my favorite things to watch now. It's an understanding of where consumers are and who consumers are and having a real respect for when and how they want to be reached. Okay, so when I was in school and I was taking all these classes and you know, you take media class and media is basically TV, radio, People magazine, you know, there was not really like a lot of variety in terms of where and how and when you could reach consumers, you know, and there were like three networks for part of my growing up and then there were four networks for part of my growing up and so those were the big three and everybody was watching the same shows and now we have this very sort of long tail situation where people are on lots of different places, they're in lots of different ways, the ways that we can. So basically what I'm saying is my favorite campaigns now are anything that use media in a really original and interesting way. Those are my favorite and those tend to not necessarily be the campaigns, but just sort of individual executions. I think those are so, so cool and those can be newer media. So things that are on like Twitter, so Wendy's has that National roast day where they invite brands and say, you know, put your name up here and invite, you know to roast me. You have Oreos and Toyota and you know, and they come up and they go “roast me,” and so Wendy's just roast them. So they said, Oreos, the one they give to Oreos was something like, “hey about that new flavor. No.” You know they’re coming out with all these new flavors. Or you know Toyota, they said “this is the Toyota Camry of tweets, it's very reliable, but nobody is really excited about it.” It's just called dark. 

Ruth Candler
That’s awesome. 

Amanda Bower
So yeah, those things are kind of cool or so media is anything that you experience, anything that you encounter and so things like stove top stuffing, they took over bus benches or bus, I don't know, I'm from the south. And what they did was they put heaters in them. So you looked up and it looked like an oven. So you're in Chicago and it's November or January or something and you're in this heated bus bench that looks like a warm, right? So what you're doing is so it goes back to the think inside the box approach where you go, okay, what are all the walls? Okay one of the walls for stovetop is, it's like warm and cozy and comforting and you know, all that, you know, Halloween, that's the next example, Thanksgiving. So how do we take that wall of that box and really lean into it? How do we create the warmness and so creating the engagement underlining something and you create the environment. So it feels kind of warm. There's another one and this one is thinking in opposite ways, which is when you think of Halloween and you think of trick or treating you go, you go from house to house. There was, I want to say, oh gosh, it was a candy brand. Oh, I'm totally blanking on it. It's the candies. They look like M&M's, but they're not, they’re sour. 

Ruth Candler
Skittles!

Amanda Bower
Skittles! I think it’s the skittles, which has this very much, this brand thing. So what they did was they came up with instead of you going from house to house, they put a house on wheels and had the house go from you to you. So they put it on wheels and they drove it around to groups of people and stopped and handed out candy with like this monster hand coming out of it. Those are the kinds of campaigns I think are really, especially as we are becoming micro targets, especially as we are not quite so uniform, I don't know that we ever were uniform. I do think there was a social reinforcement that we become uniform, but now we are freer to dye our hair purple or you know, listen to some obscure band. I mean if you think about digital media on Amazon or Apple, you know music or movies or whatever, it is theoretically infinite, right?You just keep adding servers and servers and servers so you can watch anything. And if you're the only person who downloaded that song all year, it can still live on a server. These kind of smaller, more creative, more innovative ways of coming up with media. I think it's really, those are the things that I get really excited about. 

Ruth Candler 
Right. So you touched on this in your answer to the last question, but are there any future trends in marketing and advertising that we should be on the lookout for or any new ways of engaging consumers that may not be immediately obvious to the layperson?

Amanda Bower
I think the best way to think about that is to have two things: to be willing to be creative. I'm lying, it’s at least three things. The willingness to be creative, to have a tremendous amount of humility, in that you may end up trying things that don't work or offended somebody, you know, maybe they were incredibly well intentioned, but maybe offended somebody, you went out and you tried something and you're like, nope, nope, that didn't work. And with this idea of creativity, kind of seeing things with new eyes, you know, like recognizing media, so recognizing everything that the consumer comes into contact with is a possible way or a place to communicate wherever that is. If it's a seat back on an airplane, if it's the floor, if it's the tread in the treadmill when you go running. I love this example. So Gold's gym was trying to think about how do we get people to, you know that moment where you go, oh man, I gotta get to the gym, like when you hike up this hill from the parking lot and you get to the top of the hill and you're like, oh man, I gotta go to the gym or just hike this hill again. So they wanted people to have that moment, I got to get people, I gotta get to the gym, you define that question for yourself and then you have your eyes open as you go around. And so what they did was, you know when you check out at the grocery store or Target or whatever and they have those little plastic bars that you put between your stuff and their stuff. Okay, so what they did was they took that thing and they made it weigh like 15 pounds. So when you reached over to pick this thing which normally weighs an ounce and you pick it up, you'd be like oh my gosh, why is this thing so heavy, I gotta get to the gym. So the humility to if you tried something to not just double down and triple down but to go, okay, maybe that's not working, but also the willingness to kind of define problems in a creative way and then being open eyed to where the possibilities might lie. 

Ruth Candler 
So we've talked a lot about advertising and you've said that even though you spend so much time teaching about advertising and even serving as associate editor for the Journal of Advertising that it's hard to define exactly what advertising is these days and that's apparent from you know, your last description. What did, what did you mean by that?

Amanda Bower
So the technical definition is something like any paid form of communication. So you know when you hear in politics, when they say you know “paid for by the committee to reelect yada yada.” And so that's advertising, but the things that participate in a larger strategic communication, you know, integrated marketing communication, you know, whether that's PR I mean there was no social media when I was in school, so it's just, it's become so diversified in  you know, things like pop up shops or April Fool's day jokes that are PR you know where you're like, we're going to come out with bacon flavored yogurt or something, you know, there's so many things that are that are PR or that our social media or that are influencers or and so there are a lot of things that don't necessarily fall into what we consider to be a category of what is technically considered to be advertising. You know and the other thing that I think is really interesting is that we used to think about advertising as being, you were sort of filling predetermined spots. Okay, we're gonna have print and we're going to have an ad in People magazine or Sports Illustrated and we're gonna have an ad, you know, we're gonna have ads during TV during 60 minutes and then we're gonna have ads on radio and we're gonna have, you know that you have these kind of predetermined spaces that you woke up and you started filling and now we don't think about it that way. Now it's like the line actually from Crispin Porter Bogusky when they were pitching the mini cooper campaign was, “we want to think about how to make this brand famous” and one of the definitions that I give my students in ad class is that advertising is not in the advertising business, advertising should be in the business changing business. And so however you create that, however you change that business, however you get that product launched, however you reposition the brand, that's what really matters and so what falls into that category may fall into a 1990 definition of advertising or it may be Snapchat. 

Ruth Candler 
Evolving. 

Amanda Bower
Into who the hell knows what. 

Ruth Candler
Fair enough. So I'd like to go back and talk more about W&L and our students and W&L is different from many other liberal arts colleges in that it has a nationally accredited undergraduate business school. I'm curious as to what benefits a liberal arts education has for a business student and if you're a student who is interested in pursuing business upon graduation, why not completely immerse yourself in business classes?

Amanda Bower
One thing that's interesting is when you look at what's going on, what goes on the website for W&L, you know it says, “we're the only type of credit liberal arts institution that has an accredited business school” and sometimes I hear about how the business department benefit or the business education that we have, you know, us, accounting, economics, you know, how we benefit the university by existing. And the way you ask the question I really like because it is how do our students benefit from being in a liberal arts environment? So I had a student a few years ago who said to me, he was head of that class on that year. Yeah. And no, he was the, so the way the way ad class works is you have somebody who is the second in command their first year and then they run the thing the second year. So his first year, he, you know, was second in command. And he got to hear all of my things about, you know, here's why it's so important that we have liberal arts, here's why it's so important. And he had an internship that summer with an agency out in St. Louis and then he came back and he said, oh I get it now. Oh I totally get why you're talking about how important the liberal arts are in a business environment. 

And he said because he was working with other interns and all these interns could do was they could only talk in buzzwords, they could only talk in textbook language basically the index of the textbook in advertising with that was all they knew. They struggled to think creatively, struggled to make connections, struggled to connect with what was going on in larger society. And he said, and I get it now. So, advertising and then you pull out a little bit bigger: marketing, and then you pull out a lot bigger: business. They all only exist in culture and society. That's the only place that they exist. They are a function of society. That is, that is where they exist. And so it's important that you be able to understand people, you know, one of the things you teach pretty early on and in any kind of strategy classes you teach the pastel variable. So you tell people if you're gonna come up with strategy, you've got to understand what's going on politically, what's going on environmentally, what's going on socially, technologically, ethically, legally, I’m forgetting an “ly”. Oh, economically and you need to understand all of that, you know, so you need to understand the suit that you're in and socially, so that means that you need to understand what's going on with people, where did this come from and you can get that from English. You know, where if you study literature, one of the purposes of studying literature is empathy. So you can start putting your yourself in the space of somebody who's not necessarily you, who's the target market, how are they going to react that way? 

I mean a nice example of this actually, and I say this as a white woman, is the Juneteenth. So all this Juneteenth stuff that marketers tried to recently do, it did not go so well. You know, Walmart came out with an ice cream and yeah, and it was Juneteenth ice cream and it was their own brand of great value Juneteenth ice cream. And people are like you're being really opportunistic, you're being tone deaf. Meanwhile Walmart carries an ice cream called, I think Creamalicious. It has a black woman entrepreneur who developed it. Maybe they should have worked with her. You know, you have to have an understanding of the culture in which you're functioning in order to be able to execute. And so, and I think, you know, you were asking before, what do I think is coming up in the future? And I think that's one of the things that we have to be humble about is that, you know, maybe I don't understand what it's like to be an 18-year-old guy. So like my daughter who's 18 years old constantly tells me, “oh you can tell this was, you know, this copy was written by a boomer because it's supposed to be something that Gen Z likes.” So you know that you have to have the voices of big D and small D diversity so that you can be more effective in the marketplace.

Ruth Candler
I’d like to go back to ad class for a moment. What feedback have you received from students about how ad class has influenced the way they view advertising?

Amanda Bower
It’s not just ad class. It's, it's really, I think any marketing class, any, any marketing related class, I should say. So it's a little bit like a magician's trick. You know, once you know how the trick is done, you kind of see how the trick is done and you’re like, “oh, I totally get what they're doing now.” So, you know, so for example, for anybody who's listening to this start paying attention to when a brand comes out and does the opposite. You know, McDonald’s, Coca Cola, sorry, another red brand. So when Coca Cola comes out, you know, they kind of tend to lean into the Americanness and the fishing with your grandpa kind of brand. And then you look at what, what Pepsi did, which was, they came out and you know, there were, there was not really a lot they could go, they’re both southern brands. So what Pepsi did was they said, okay, if that's like fishing with your grandpa, Pepsi is gonna be the young, have fun drink Pepsi, which is why they usually sponsored the Super Bowl halftime show and hired Britney or Beyoncé or whoever so that they could be young. So, you know, Coke is old and Pepsi is young.

And so it's, most the students complained that it kind of ruins television watching for them. They used to complain. I don't know anybody is watching now. Now they're all just watching TikTok. 

Ruth Candler
Right.

Amanda Bower
Yeah, which is fair because I mean me too. So it is a little bit like, oh, I now know, I can just see the man behind the curtain perpetually that I understand what they're doing and I understand what the brands are and it doesn't mean that it ruins the whole thing for them because sometimes you'll run into a brand that is still for you. Like you still like that brand. You know, I mean, people can say whatever they want about Starbucks, you know, oh, they burned the beans. I don't care. I don't even really like coffee. I like warm milk shakes that keep me awake. Off we go, you know, and so it's a brand that I feel like I'm happy with it. People keep telling me diet coke, it's gonna kill you. I'm like, not yet, hasn't, whatever damage it was going to do. It has done it long ago, chuck chuck chuck. So, like that ad campaign that diet coke had a few years ago about like celebrating moms, you know, where they had that insight of your mom grew up in the eighties, drinking diet coke and you know, and look how awesome she is. I cannot tell you the number of students and my children who sent that to me and I was like, that is just a gorgeous, gorgeous insight of understanding the role of a product in the life of consumers. Yeah. When they were doing Taylor Swift, I'm not so much in that target market, but moms breezing themselves in the eighties and nineties on diet coke. That's mine.

Ruth Candler
Well, when you talk about peeling back that curtain, just a little bit, it's like, you know, you almost feel like you could think something like gee, I wanna, I want to buy a pair of red suede shoes and then all of a sudden, you're on social media and you see the ad pop up. So it's almost like they're, they're mind reading and it does ruin it for you. 

Amanda Bower
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, some of those, some of the algorithms are a little wonky, you know, you go and you're like, I need a vacuum cleaner. So you go and you look at a vacuum cleaner and then for the next six weeks Amazon’s like, “you bought this vacuum cleaner, would you like to look at these other seven?” and you're like, “no, I'm good. Just the one.”

Ruth Candler
Just the one. 

Amanda Bower
I'm excellent on just the one. Yes. Sometimes that retargeting doesn't work so great. 

Ruth Candler
So we talked about feedback that you received from students on an ad class and how that influenced the way they viewed advertising. Would you say that there is any difference in the feedback that you received from business majors versus non-business majors? 

Amanda Bower 
So one time in my spring term class, in the previous version of a spring term class, it attracted a lot of non-business majors as well. And I, I almost hesitated to tell this story. This is many years ago. 12? Something, like a long time ago. That version of that class I taught is like a seminar. So the last day we sat around and I said, okay, so what was the number one thing that you learned from us, this experience?  Because we were applying some qualitative, we were learning qualitative data collection kinds of techniques and it was so cool. So I think that was the year we did Vicks VapoRub. We did Vicks. It was so cool. It was so cool because what we did, y'all feel free to believe this, but it came out in the, it was the word that we kept saying. So you go around and you interview people and you'd be like, okay, so Vicks VapoRub, you know? And so we'd interview, what do you or we’d have them do like collages. Like what pictures do you associate with Vicks VapoRub? And the thing that kept coming out when they went interview. So you have them make a collage, what are all the things that remind you of Vicks VapoRub or Vicks? Vicks, just like the Vicks brand? And so they were coming out with it and then you interview them. What does this picture mean? Does this picture mean? And the thing we kept hearing over and over again was the phrase “kicks my ass” or “kicks it ass.” Like that was the specific phrase that we heard over and over again. Either “this cold is kicking my ass” or “Vicks will kick its ass” or it was just over and over and over again and we were like, okay, that phrase was really interesting, right? Because it's violent, right? The cold is being violent to me. The, I mean we've all had NyQuil, right? It's pretty violent, you know, I mean that flavor, you know, that don't make any plans thing? You know, hope you're sitting down while you take it, the Vicks VapoRub has, you know, has action. They always have like the little squiggly lines in their ads and it was a really interesting application that people were seeing this kind of violence. It was leading us to an insight which we thought was really pretty interesting. And so the last day I had a psychology major in there and so I was going, you know what was the biggest thing you learned and some people really like the qualitative data techniques or you know how you kind of question the assumptions of you start research by starting with a SurveyMonkey or whatever. And this one student said to me, I learned my major wasn't a waste of time. My minor in my PhD program was in fact social psychology. My whole dissertation was basically social psychology. Like everything that we're doing in business is an application of something in social psychology or sociology or queuing theory or you know logistics is, is pulling from a different, you know, it's just everything that we're doing is pulled from somewhere else. And I guess this student was worried about, you know, what kind of job can I have. And actually, I had this conversation with my daughter the other day, she's like what do you do with this? And I was like, oh my lord, everything. You do everything with it. On the other hand, I think some of the business majors pick the business major because they're like, I want a job, I'm going to get a job. What would get me a job, a job major? Something that's very myopic and I want job, get job, have job, businesses is job. I think it goes both ways. It's having the students who are business majors start to realize the value of the rest of their liberal arts education and having the students who are liberal arts majors, suddenly realizing I'm an English major, just as I'm reading a text and reading between the lines, that skill is incredibly transferable to reading and understanding what consumers are saying, like what are consumers saying that they don't understand that they're saying? So, I mean, everybody's out there getting a job, so it's there, it's all valuable, they're just all valuable in different ways. 

Ruth Candler
So before we wrap up our conversation, we're gonna move into what we call our lightning round, which is just a few, a few quick questions. So what is your all-time favorite advertising campaign and why?

Amanda Bower
Okay, so my Gen X is very much gonna show right now. It's the old, absolute campaign. 

Ruth Candler
Oh, describe that. 

Amanda Bower
He knows. 

Ruth Candler
For everybody who “he” is, it's Jim Goodwin, our technical producer. 

Amanda Bower
So yeah, okay, so, it's Google, Absolute Google Image.

Ruth Candler
Absolute Google Images. I’ll put the link in our show notes.

Amanda Bower
So yeah, okay, so I went to college in the late eighties early, I graduated ’91. I love this campaign. It is basically they take the bottle, the shape of the absolute bottle, which is iconic and then they function within a space. They, it's the bottle does something or so and then they have absolute fill in the blank. 

Ruth Candler
Oh I do remember that! Yeah!

Amanda Bower
Yeah, so absolute Chicago or absolute Wendy or absolute Maryland or absolute computer or absolute right? So and they and they did it for, so when Helen Gurley Brown retired as the editor of Cosmopolitan, they had an absolute Gurley Brown. They did one specifically for her.  They did one absolute New Yorker and the style of their, they did absolute playboy where they printed like a tri fold and the bottle had no writing on it, gold right there. I saved them and they were all up on my wall in college and my parents would come and look at my dorm room and shake their heads sadly, I'm like, “no, no, no it’s marketing, it's marketing.” It's marketing. So you know, actually this whole PhD in marketing and career in marketing is really just a long con to calm my parents down. And one of the reasons I love it in retrospect is because it is functioning within a box. They put themselves in the box. They said okay, we can only have, it has to be the bottle, it has to be the shape, it has to be absolute fill in the blank. They did absolute magic where you opened it up and it turned out it was like a cut out and it was missing. I mean, they had, and so they had to be incredibly inventive within a box.

I think your ideas when you stick yourself in a box are so much more creative than if you just blue sky it. Anybody who's ever watched Project Runway or one of those shows where they go, you can only do this as opposed to your dream idea. The dream ideas are never interesting.

It's always the you have to make an outfit out of.

Ruth Candler 
Toilet paper. 

Amanda Bower
Out of toilet paper and or the insides of a Saturn, you know. So those were really cool and if they ever brought it back, I don't know if they ever if they ever would, but if they did, I would love to see how they would do it from media standpoint. You know, original kind of, creative media standpoint. It would be very cool. 

Ruth Candler
Very cool. Agree. On the flip side when you're providing examples of really bad advertising ideas in class, what examples do you use? 

Amanda Bower
So I have this one ad that I use in class and I told the students like, you can come back here in 20 years, I'm gonna still use it. It's still gonna be here. This is gonna be the ad. I call it the fat muffin ad.  And so it's an ad of a family. You know, it's in the morning and they're all trying to get out of the house and it's like a mom and a dad and twins and like three older sisters, and like a little kid. And they're all going, are we ready to go? Are we ready to go? I fed muffin, I'm ready to go, I fed muffin and I'm ready to go. I fed muffin and I'm ready to go. And then you hear like whatever music and you look and then you hear like a dog collar jangling and you look and it's this enormously fat dog that's waddled into the picture and you look at this enormously fat dog. And so then I pause the ad and I asked the students what do you think this ad is for?  And you know, and we're like everything from, you know, a family organizer, birth control, you know, automatic dog feeder, you know, lots of things, right? And diet dog food is another one that they go, because and the idea is like a product, a product and a brand. You need to know what role it fills in your target markets life. You have to know what the point of it is. What role does it serve? Does it make me feel good about myself? Does it make my, you know, is it solving like a really kind of technical problem, you know, like pop sockets on the back of phones, help you hold it, help prop it up, right?  You have to understand, but they also have images on them. So they're really self-expressive. And the ad is for a breakfast cereal. 

Ruth Candler
What? 

Amanda Bower
Right? Exactly makes no sense at all. It's for breakfast cereal and he goes, do you need a better way to start your day? And so it's a woman, eating a breakfast cereal. And she's like all placidly, oh, I'm eating my breakfast cereal and I'm like, girl, you don't have time for that. You, what are you doing? Even if it were breakfast bars, that would be a little bit better. You know, I mean, that's how a lot of us clean up from breakfast, like we wipe our lap off as we get out of the car. 

Ruth Candler
Do you remember what breakfast cereal it was? 

Amanda Bower
Fruit Harvest, I believe. I don't know. 

Ruth Candler
Is there still a Fruit Harvest breakfast cereal? 

Amanda Bower
I mean, I don’t know, not based on their advertising, they didn't accomplish anything. 

Ruth Candler
Alright, that’s fair. 

Amanda Bower
So I talk about it because you have to understand the role of a product or a brand, really a brand. Because cereal is not hard to make, I mean, cereal is a commodity. It is not hard to freeze dried fruit and make it into a flake. Like it's just not. I mean, most things that we have nowadays, I mean, remember this big dramatic lawsuit between Samsung and Apple on who owned rounded rectangle. I mean a big knockdown drag out about owning a rounded rectangle shape. And finally, a judge was like, yeah, whatever, y'all can all own it. And Apple was like, but we're the only ones. Now, everybody owns a rounded rectangles. They're a commodity. So it really, it's product, but it's a lot about the brand.  Like what role does this product play in your life and it doesn't solve a problem, if anything, it makes it worse. This woman does not have time to be eating like a joyful, peaceful cereal by herself, by the way. It's like, what you do with the rest of your family? You came back? What the hell happened? Yeah. 

Ruth Candler
What do you enjoy doing when you're not on campus? 

Amanda Bower
Um, so,

Ruth Candler
Eating breakfast cereal.

Amanda Bower
Eating breakfast cereal. Actually, I do like a good breakfast cereal. Actually, sales of breakfast cereal and slices of cheese went up during the pandemic because we were all home and everybody's like, I cannot eat another slice of sour dough, like just cannot. So everybody started eating more cereal because they were like

Ruth Candler
Tired of sour dough? 

Amanda Bower
Because they were like, yeah, I'm not. And actually the thing that grew the most during the early stages of the pandemic was not Purell, which you think it would be, it was actually oat milk grew the most.

Ruth Candler
Why oat milk? 

Amanda Bower
Because we were all eating cereal and it has a longer shelf life and is shelf stable. So you, because freezers sold out, so people couldn't keep all this stuff cold. And so oat milk actually skyrocketed in sales. What do I do when I'm not here? 

Ruth Candler 
You talk a lot about cereal and advertising. 

Amanda Bower
Yeah. Talk about cereal. We currently have foster kittens in the house. So I'm doing a lot of foster kittens. 

Ruth Candler
Well thank you for coming to campus today and tearing yourself away from your foster kittens.  

Amanda Bower
My baby kitties, I know I was a little worried I was not going to get here on time because they, you know, they're kittens and they needed, they're very cute if anybody needs a kitten—

Ruth Candler
Maybe we'll post that on the show notes. 

Amanda Bower
The show notes. Here's the link to the kitties. The past couple of years have been really busy. My daughter graduated from high school, looking at colleges, she's going to liberal arts school by the way. You know, going to my son's basketball stuff. 

Ruth Candler
It's in the car a lot. 

Amanda Bower
Well, and I'm a department head. 

Ruth Candler
So you’re busy. 

Amanda Bower
Yeah. 

Ruth Candler
So when you're on campus though, what brings you the most joy? 

Amanda Bower
Small group meetings with students I think. There's a space in the basement of Holekamp. And depending on what age our listeners are, if they're my age, it's where you got your chicken sandwiches. It's in the basement. 

Ruth Candler
Used to be called the Co-op, correct? 

Amanda Bower
Co-op, yeah, it's in the basement of the Co-op. We took it over, the basement of it. And it's got like a long white board that fills one whole long hallway and we go down there like an ad class and just start, you know, brainstorming up ideas.  We fill it in. It's asking them questions about what they've done, what they've found, what they've learned where they're stuck. I think those are my favorite moments. I've been known to like literally jump up and down doing that, you know, coming up with good original ideas because eventually they're not gonna be here and they're not gonna be with me and they’re, you know, we’re in an era where it's no longer an information delivery system, like that's not what education is anymore. It's preparing students to be able to come up with original ideas when you're not there anymore.  That sounded kind of grim. But you know, what's really exciting is we're gonna be building new buildings. We’re no longer going to be in the vitamin D deprived basement of Holekamp. We're gonna have really interactive space that's gonna support that kind of kind of environment that’s, you know, small group, big ideas kinds of spaces and it's so, that's my favorite, I think my favorite thing to do. 

Ruth Candler
So, working with small groups of students brings you joy. What inspires you? 

Amanda Bower
Probably, this might not be the best answer in the world, but reflecting, reflecting on how things were done and thinking about how they can be improved and thinking about opportunities and possibilities. You know, and sometimes those are negative things, right? Sometimes those are things of, oh man, this was done to me and I never want anybody to have to experience that again, you know, either in college or graduate school or you know, on the interstate, but I think also things that were done for you and benefited you or how people stood up for you or intervene for you. To say, what does it say? Be the change you want to see in the world? I mean, I'm not, you know, not that dramatic, but whatever small version of that. 

Ruth Candler
Sure. 

Amanda Bower
Although I did see a version of the other day, which was be the drama you want to see in the world. And I’m like I can get behind that too. I can actually 100% get behind that. But just, you know, thinking about I mean, I've been here. I mean, I just finished my 20th year here and I had, you know, a lot of life before that.  And so to be able to say, what have I observed? How can we really lean into our strengths and advocate for our students? I think that's really exciting.

Ruth Candler
Well, speaking of students, I know that prospective students sometimes listen to our podcast. 

Amanda Bower
Yeah. 

Ruth Candler
If you could give them one piece of advice, what would it be? 

Amanda Bower
Oh, goodness. So my daughter just went through this. So for my daughter, for her, I wanted her to find her people. I think, that's really important to find people that you trust, to find people that you can brainstorm with, find people that you can work with. It's just so important to find your, I think it's so important to find your people. 

Ruth Candler
Yeah. 

Amanda Bower
You know, that you can be in a class with, that you can do group projects with because nobody works by themselves. Stephen King doesn't work by himself. I mean, you know his name’s on there, but he has to, you know, he has editors and he's got you know, so I mean, and I have spent so much time with, you know, the advisers in that class or listening in on group projects and working with groups and knowing what my own department is like and finding people that you have common values with and common priorities with. I don't mean big V values.  I mean, small v values, you know that you know, like one of the things that we've been working is we're hiring so much in our department is finding people who also understand that this is not just a small business department, this is a small business department embedded in a liberal arts institution. I mean, and that's the first question when we interview candidates. So if job candidates are listening to this, here's a little inside story.  We, the first question we ask is, “Why W&L?” and if they don't answer a certain part of it in that question the next question is “why do you want to teach in a liberal arts environment?” That’s the second question. And so finding your people, I think it helps develop you, it will make your experience better, it'll make your education better, it’ll make your study abroad better. It'll make you better. You'll have people that you trust to give you feedback on the things that you're doing well and the things that you have opportunities to improve on. So when you're looking at schools I mean that's what you wanna do. Yeah.

Ruth Candler
Yeah. That's great. Great advice. Well on the flip side if you had to give that, a piece of advice, to a W&L senior who is about to embark on their life after W&L, what would it be? 

Amanda Bower
Find your people! Keep your people. 

Ruth Candler
Keep your people?

Amanda Bower
Keep your people. Oh I've got a good one. Okay so and if these women are listening they'll know who they are. So several years ago I had I had two women and one of whom was a business major and the other one was I wanna say a strat com and sociology double major and they took ad class and they were gonna be advisers the next year one of them was going to be the head of it and they had an internship so it's not quite your question but it fits.  So they had this internship at a, not quite an ad agency, but definitely in the field, it's more of like an influencer kind of agency. And they walked in and the business major woman she said, “I'm a little worried about this because I'm not a marketing major, I'm not an advertising major. I don't have the depth of knowledge.  I don't have that full index of an advertising textbook memorized yet.” And the other woman looked at her and said, “You think that's bad? I'm not even a business major. You know, I don't even have a business textbook memorized yet.” So she was, they were really worried. And then, but because they were so good at listening to feedback and not getting discouraged and iterations and improvements and thinking about creative ideas and working with other people and you know, they're able to present on their feet very, very quickly that a lot of the things that we really, you know, I mean there are a lot of things in the business, I mean in the liberal arts environment that we say, you know, critical thinking, creative thinking, but also even transferable skills. You know, the ability to read between text, the ability to understand what's going on in the cultural soup in which business lives, stews. They were the only ones at the end of the of the summer who were asked to stay on. They were hired to continue their project.

Ruth Candler
Wow. 

Amanda Bower
Throughout the course of the year because they were the only ones who could do all of those things, right. 

Ruth Candler
What a great example. 

Amanda Bower
Yeah. And I mean they were they were able to do to do those things. So I would say believe in your education and not just, you know, when you look at a resume and it's like here are my relevant coursework. I took managerial finance and I took this and I took this except there's so many other things that you learned while you were here that are transferable. You know, the ability to get up and give you know a spontaneous talk, the ability to take feedback and do it again. The, you know, the iterative work that you've done. I mean all of those things are just so, so valuable and transfer.  

Ruth Candler 
Yeah. That is a great way to end our podcast. Thank you so much for being with us today Amanda. I appreciate it.

Amanda Bower
Yeah, you're welcome. Absolutely.

Ruth Candler
And thanks to all of you who have tuned in to listen. We hope you'll visit our website, wlu.edu/lifelong, where you can find out more on today's topic as well as a truly great selection of W&L after-class discussions covering everything from 15th century Florence, to the genetics of black widow spider silk, to the science of smell. Take a look. And until next time let's remain together, not unmindful of the future.