Associate Professor [Jay Newell](/directory/jay-newell/) reports the following:
In teaching, the Computational Communication: Ad Creative course starts its second semester. Joining Newell are Wallapak Tavanapong and [Sherry Berghefer](/directory/sherry-berghefer/). The course was featured in the latest edition of the LAS Link magazine. “Ad Principles got off to a good start,” he states, “with Wednesday Wake Up Calls with former students Elizabeth Sener, just starting a media planning job in Austin, TX, and Ty Stafford, just named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 rising media stars.” The Ad Media (Advrt 335) continues to focus on political media planning. The group projects from the Fall 2015 semester were critiqued by a pair of political media professionals in a Skype from Washington.
In service and also scholarship, Newell is leading group of advertising and PR students who are assisting the Des Moines Register’s in their coverage of the colossal amount of political ad spending in the runup to the Iowa Caucuses. The students are digging into broadcast advertising contracts as they’re filed with the FCC, and compiling a database that has is being used by the Register’s investigative team. During the holiday break the Register hosted the students for a meeting with the editorial and sales staffs of the paper. After the Caucuses the adspend data will be contrasted with attitudinal data collected by the ISU Political Science Department for a journal article.
Finally, Newell will be participating in two teaching panels in 2016. “My work with multi-lingual teaching will be featured at the American Academy of Advertising in March, and a panel at the AEJMC in August will profile the Computational Communication course under the umbrella of integrating specialized marketing topics into the Ad/PR curriculum.”