Direct Marketing Students Win
Awards and Gain Resource Center

The Zicklin School of Business Direct Marketing Resource Center at Baruch College opened in early December as an interactive classroom facility and direct marketing laboratory for students studying the personalized and interactive approaches to promoting products and companies. The investment is well deserved. With an extraordinary record in the Direct Marketing Association’s national Collegiate ECHO competition over the last five years (no school has more awards in that time), Baruch has strong national standing as a center for Direct and Interactive Marketing Studies.

According to marketing associate professor Harvey Markovitz, “Since the 2000-2001 academic year, thirty-eight of our graduate students, fourteen this year alone, have been acknowledged by the ECHO competition with honorable mention, semi-finalist, bronze, silver or gold trophy awards for their excellence in creating integrated direct marketing strategic planning and tactical message delivery campaigns. Their clients have not been part of case book studies but real time clients like Hallmark Cards, Mazda, and Advanta. This year they are working on an ING Direct multifaceted challenge. Our students have won the most awards for any school in New York and the United States.”

This year’s winners were honored by the Direct Marketing Club of New York at a special ceremony in September held at the Yale Club. The students received silver and bronze DMA Echo trophies and honorable mentions in the nation-wide Collegiate Echo Competition, held annually by the DMA’s Education Foundation. The 2003-2004 competition was built around the challenge of marketing the Advanta credit card to women small-business owners. Silver winners were Hye-Youn Kim, Jorge Miranda, Sachin Panjwani and Lara Solomon. Bronze winners were, Jonathan Futter, Divanna Gilleaudeau and Michael Stromer. Semi finalists were Debbie Avery, Asaph Elan Prianka Advani, Anita Raghavan, Lijo Joseph, Chaim Langer, and Marcela
Solano.

If the direct marketing students are not competing for national prizes they are working on projects that benefit Baruch College. This past summer grad students in the program created eight campaigns that were adopted by the Baruch College Fund for its fundraising and other support efforts on behalf of the College.

Direct Marketing students are currently working for the Committee on Academic Integrity headed by the Associate Provost Dennis Slavin and the Dean of Students Ron Aaron to create a marketing message to raise awareness about integrity among Baruch college students, not just to control cheating but to create programs with students that encourage an environment of honesty. They’ve also done marketing projects for the Newman Library and other units in the college.