CONFERENCE RECAPS

I was lucky enough to get a couple of tickets to TrendWatching’s conference ‘Trends of 2020’ in New York City, which was hosted on October 1, 2019. TrendWatching is the #1 trend intelligence platform in the world. The conference first covered what had shaped consumer expectations since 2018, the most influential consumer trends of 2019, and then moved into trends to watch in 2020. One key takeaway from the conference is the importance of brands and companies looking outside their category and sector in order to thrive and evolve. This is also referred to as trend-driven innovation, which leads me to some of the opportunity-takeaways: cross-sector loyalty, reward sharing, reward engagement, and reward green living. Starting with cross sector loyalty, NYC-based Hooch is a perfect example. The company is currently running a beta-test with 200,000 users, testing a new “coin” which consumers connect their credit card to. The idea is that users earn 10% of purchases back in TAP, the “...

Today, I had the pleasure of attending Day 3 of Advertising Week NYC 2019. Caught up in a whirlwind of advertising (shocking), tech, data, and you guessed it, people, I did not know where to look or what to do first. Luckily, I figured it out. The first talk I attended was “Getting Ahead of the Data Curve.” Since I don’t have much to do with data or data mining on a day-to-day basis, this session was incredibly informative. It also appears that to big companies, I, as a millennial, have been pigeonholed into the demographic that is on the cusp of being “afraid” of companies’ data mining, while simultaneously understanding why they do it, and what they do with it. Truth be told, both assessments of myself are correct: I am equally intrigued, yet terrified of companies having my data. The reality is that there is no escaping data collection with the amount of technology in existence today, so we might as well understand how and why it’s being done. What I learned is that compani...

This fall I will begin my second year of graduate level studies as a member of the Branding + Integrated Communications program. After several years, I decided that it was time to reset my career. The only option that came to mind was entering Public Relations (my undergraduate major). Diversity and inclusion is a major factor in the current world of communications. As a minority, I want to take advantage of any opportunity possible to assist in my pursuit of completing my studies and moving into the professional world of Public Relations. A major step was applying for and being awarded the 2019 LAGRANT Foundation Scholarship. Over a three-day period, I had the honor of attending 2019 Scholarship and Donor Recognition Ceremonies at the Cincinnati, Ohio headquarters of Proctor & Gamble. Led by key leaders from the LAGRANT Foundation, Proctor & Gamble and Citizen Relations. Career building and networking were the focuses of the event.  Day #1 consisted of a Welcome Di...

On September 26, the best projects on innovation in media and technology from the best Universities around New York City, came together at NYCCT to showcase their newest advancements in the NYC Media Lab annual summit.  When people think about media, they immediately think TV, magazine, news, etc. the classic set of media, however the media labs brings together projects that tests and breaks the limits of what media means. From AI driven experiences to emotional response analysis software, NYC’s Media Lab brings together the newest game changing possibilities in media and technology. The event was divided into the main Keynotes program, workshops and a showroom. Along the program many prototypes and start-ups were presented, including: an AI tool to process raw video footage of news stories sorting automatically elements of the story and putting them together. A prototype of an app to help make NYC subway stations accessible to people who are blind by using live subway and voi...

Receiving my scholarship to the LAGrant Foundation was a huge milestone for me considering it kicked off my career. I was able to participate in career building activities with The LGF in Cincinnati, Ohio which was a great experience. As a grad student, pursuing a career in the communications field, I felt overjoyed to be surrounded with likeminded and dedicated peers. This was a great occasion to meet industry professionals, network and gain exposure Marketing/Advertising and the Public Relations field. Most importantly, many of these people were first generation minority students in the workforce, like myself. All participants were able to visit the P&G headquarters where a series of workshops were held. These various workshops gave me great insight on the importance of diversity and inclusion in the communications field overall. As a minority, we are needed in the communications field because our wide ranged backgrounds. Our world view is essential for campaigns to be relata...

NYC Media Lab is perfect platform for learning about innovation, media and technology. It is in collaboration with several corporations, companies & universities, which provides it a huge support and talent from across the city and country. Influenced by its vast network of design, technical, media and engineering researchers from the campuses in New York, the summit produces research, development and knowledge exchange through an open innovative and challenging ecosystem for upcoming media and technology trends in the industry. The summit has a goal of developing talent throughout the campuses in New York.The partnered universities and companies, involve and interact in events majorly about technology and new trends in media and discuss on issues on research and big data, connect with each other and with students and entrepreneurs and discuss upcoming projects that suits their interests. As an example, Hearst collaborated with a team MFA students at Parsons New School pursuing ...

I learned so much in the Advertising Week. I spent two days there, and I listened different speeches. “How does Google market Google” was one of my favorite speeches, which was held by Google’s VP of Marketing, Marvin Chow. Chow mentioned Google founder held the first conference in June 7th 1999. It was there, Google’s mission as Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” “At the time, it seems like a very ambition mission, as a marketing group the team less focused on the tradition market back then, but they more focused on the idea of information and how they can help the more and more people in the market.  There are so many changes since then, more information is available online. The power of information gives people its potential. As a company far beyond research, there are so many products all through our growth and our evolution. The Google’s mission still feels very true today. Everyone knows and uses Google’s products. If we just ...

CUNY School of Technology hosted the Annual Media Lab Summit on Technology and Innovation which consisted of several keynote speakers, Innovative research project pitches from students around New York, a product demo/expo fair and small workshops to facilitate discussion and ideas around exciting new tech innovations. The day kicked off strongly with an innovation panel discussion between four great forces within the media/tech and social justice community led by Justin Hendrix, Executive Director of NYC’s Media Lab. Hendrix asked the group to address big topics such as, what is the most important tech trend that will affect us in the next ten years? Yael Eisenstat, Policy Advisor at the Center for Humane Technology, responded that it’s our over-reliance on social media where we get our news feeds which will diminish the overall quality of journalism and prevent people from critical thinking, “First, fast and free is not sustainable,” she says. Though journalism is a business, th...

NYC Media Lab 2019 started with introductions from the people working behind-the-scenes for this year’s NYC Media Lab. Justin Hendrix, the Executive Director of NYC Media Lab and RLab spoke about how this new wave of interfaces is on the way and how Virtual Augmented Reality, Brain Computer interfaces and Neuro Interfaces are going to be the future of technology. He further spoke about how technology and media are a really important part of our economy and play a crucial role in functioning of the city. In order to be ready for the future we need to try to think about the implications of this and come up with creative solutions for the the age old media problems. He also briefly spoke about creating a healthier media environment for our society to function smoothly and how NYC Media Lab will see demos that are pushing limits of these new interfaces and how that’s changing the economics of media business. Steven Rosenbaum - the new managing director of NYC Media Lab spoke about diver...