Digital Marketing Program Learning Outcomes

The Learning Outcomes for the Digital Marketing program are guided by eight core standards broken into four major themes. These learning outcomes are embedded in the courses, assessments, and extracurricular opportunities throughout the Digital Marketing major. The program is designed around the fundamental idea that digital marketing helps you connect your story with those who most need to hear it. Students develop sets of skills to research, critically analyze, and creatively produce marketing materials that matter to build brands that last. To remain in good standing in the Digital Marketing program, students are expected to meet three benchmarks over the course of their program: maintaining a 2.0 GPA or higher in their courses; successfully completing an approved international experience or internship, or a domestic internship; and meeting proficiency on the capstone project.

Learning Outcomes

Theme 1: Marketing Studies – Graduates demonstrate the ability to thoughtfully describe, critically analyze, and insightfully reflect upon the histories of marketing scholarship. Graduates showcase their mastery of these materials in the research underpinning their content creation processes in a variety of (digital) advertising settings, and by generating ideas, questions, or proposals about the theme for their ongoing academic and professional development.

Standard 1: Theoretical Frameworks  – Graduates understand the historical lineages of relevant, prominent marketing and digital media studies scholarship, and exhibit the ability to critically situate and evaluate key concepts and academic lines of inquiry within their respective cultural and social contexts. 

Standard 2: Methodological Tools – Graduates understand the foundational quantitative and qualitative methods and methodologies of marketing and digital media studies research, including media analysis, persuasive message design, and audience analysis, facilitating their critical examination of the impacts of advertising materials on past, present, and future audiences.

Theme 2: Digital Media Arts – Graduates demonstrate the ability to thoughtfully describe, critically analyze, and insightfully reflect upon the use of a range of production tools to create persuasive, informative, and engaging marketing content. Candidates showcase their proficiency in these tools by conceptualizing, drafting, creating, and publishing a portfolio of advertising campaign materials.

Standard 3: Content Production Skills – Graduates understand the central concepts, tools of production, and structures of the (digital) media outlets across which they will independently be creating their content, designing and producing dynamic, compelling, and inclusive interdisciplinary multimedia research and portfolio projects that foreground the needs of their community stakeholders. 

Standard 4: For-Profit/Non-Profit Storytelling – Graduates understand how to apply audience analysis and persuasive storytelling conventions in the creation and curation of dynamic and compelling multimedia marketing productions, assisting for-profit and non-profit organizations in their brand building and the achieving of their strategic goals.

Theme 3: Ethics and Social Responsibility – Graduates demonstrate the ability to thoughtfully describe, critically analyze, and insightfully reflect upon the historical trajectory and contemporary state of marketing as a cultural institution, a global industry, and a set of practices. They can trace the histories of major issues and problem areas across the global advertising landscape relative to minority groups and under-represented communities. Graduates generate ideas, questions, or proposals about the theme for their ongoing professional development, mastering the skills required for the production of ethical advertising campaigns while grappling with the often-conflicting imperatives of profit maximization and corporate social responsibility.

Standard 5: Diversity and Inclusion – Graduates understand and use multiple methods of accurate, responsible, and ethical content creation across (digital) outlets to explicate local, regional, national, and international connections, connects differing concepts and perspectives to engage audiences in critical thinking related to historical, contemporary, and emerging local and global issues. Graduates are able to chart how predominant social assumptions and communication norms common across advertising outlets can devalue and silence non-dominant groups.

Standard 6: Critical Information Literacy – Graduates exhibit the media and information literacy required to critically navigate the contemporary (digital) marketing landscape, as well as pivot and chart courses through emerging media environments and the forms of discourse and communicative norms they inspire – including VR/AR, artificial intelligence, video streaming, “Big Data” analysis, and marketing automation. 

Theme 4: Global Marketing – Graduates demonstrate the ability to thoughtfully describe, critically analyze, and insightfully reflect upon the wide-ranging, intersectional implications of the global socio-economic, cultural, and environmental currents affecting the historical trajectory and contemporary state of the marketing landscape. Graduates generate ideas, questions, or proposals about the theme for their ongoing professional development, mindful of their own positionality and attuned to regional differences in audience composition, -wants, and -needs.

Standard 7: Local-Global Citizenship – Graduates understand the central concepts, tools of production, and structures of the global marketing landscapes in which they will independently be creating their content, sensitively mindful of the differing, cross-cultural contexts in which they will work to reach, persuade, and engage with global audiences.

Standard 8: Cross-Cultural Competencies – Graduates understand differing global lineages of relevant marketing and advertising scholarship, and exhibits the ability to critically situate key concepts and academic lines of inquiry within their respective cultural and social (inter)national contexts, including understanding and navigating the legislative comparative differences across (inter)national media systems in which their campaigns will be launched.