Professor, Alum, and Student Part of Award-Winning Integrated Marketing Campaign

Campus Communications Staff / Nov 08, 2022

Head shots of Laurence Minsky, Left to Right: Professor Laurence Minsky, Dmitry Sandel, and Madison Apton.
Professor Laurence Minsky — along with alum Dmitry Sandel ’96 and student Madison Apton — helps team win gold at Marcom Awards, an international competition.

Congratulations to Laurence Minsky, professor and director of Graduate Programs in the Communication Department of the School of Media Art, and the team at Marketing for Wellness for winning gold from the Marcom Awards, an international awards competition. The team received the award in the Strategic Communications/Marketing-Promotion Campaign/Integrated Marketing Category.  

In addition to Minsky, who is a consultant for the Marketing for Wellness agency, the team included Columbia Alum Dmitry Sandel ’96 as creative director/designer and Madison Apton, a summer intern from Columbia who provided quality control for the agency and the campaign. 

While truly a team effort, Minsky’s contributions to the campaign included co-developing the overall brand strategy, helping develop an integrated marketing plan, writing a new e-commerce website on the Shopify platform, and working on the social media and influencer campaign.  

Results include an almost three-fold increase in social media engagement and significant increases in sales volumes while decreasing advertising costs by more than 90 percent. 

Like many faculty at Columbia, Minsky takes his industry experience and applies it to the classroom. He used experiences from this campaign to help illustrate to his students ad campaign and social media concepts, practices, and strategies.  

What makes this accomplishment especially remarkable, says Minsky, is that a significant portion of the website back-end development team worked on the campaign while in the Ukraine, sometimes sheltering in bomb shelters while they worked.  

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