Shanita B. Akintonde
Shanita B. Akintonde, MBA is the Advertising Program Coordinator and Associate Professor in the Marketing Communication Department where she serves at the helm of the department’s advertising program, an entity whose curricular pathways are grounded in theoretical as well as real-world concepts to help ensure a robust learning environment for students. Sample course offerings include Interactive Advertising, Ad Agency, Consumer Behavior, Anatomy of a Commercial, and Semiotics.
Ms. Akintonde hires and supervises part-time and full-time advertising faculty while working collaboratively to implement initiatives that help ensure successful matriculation of approximately 500+ undergraduate students annually. Her teaching repertoire stretches across all three department concentrations and includes several courses that she developed such as: Advertising to Women and Hip Hop Cultural Trends in Advertising.
Ms. Akintonde established and served as faculty advisor to the award-winning Columbia College Marketing Association (1999-2009) and as the department's first faculty member solely dedicated to advising incoming students. Prior to joining Columbia, Ms. Akintonde created strategic advertising and public relations campaigns for numerous agencies including Burrell Communications Group, Porter Novelli, BBDO and DDB for clients such as McDonald's, Sprite, and Procter & Gamble. She is also creator and faculty producer of one of the nation's premier career advice, leadership and networking conferences for Media arts majors known as ADSTOCK.
She earned a BA degree in advertising from Columbia College Chicago, an MBA in marketing and organizational development from Illinois Institute of Technology, and has completed doctoral coursework in a higher education program at Loyola University Chicago. In addition, she has obtained certification in The Art of Leadership from The Lake Forest College of Management, Advanced Advertising Studies from University of Illinois - Champaign-Urbana and Media Planning from McDonald Corporation’s Hamburger University.
In June 2006, Ms. Akintonde was named as a scholar with the Carnegie of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning where she presented her ongoing research work, Does Higher Education Truly C.A.R.E. about Diversity Initiatives? She has also published several articles on the topics of leadership, personal success and diversity and was a contributing author of the book, “Unleash the Leader Within You: How to Achieve the Success that You Deserve.
Ms. Akintonde is a member of The American Marketing Association, The American Educational Research Association, and The Public Relations Society of America. She has received numerous awards and honors in recognition of her business, scholarly, civic, and community activities and in 2009 was named as an Emerging Leader by Diversity MBA Magazine.
