Ayokay is excited to announce our 2024 Scholarship Winner: Sabrina Nur! As a freshman at DePaul University, Sabrina is already thinking about the future of marketing, including how emerging technologies like AI will shape the industry. In our discussion with her, she highlighted the power of human creativity in crafting campaigns that truly connect with people—something she believes AI can enhance but never replace. Check out her perspectives about the future of marketing and how a beauty campaign inspired her to pursue more creative endeavors.
Q: What is your major and what year are you?
A: I’m a freshman at DePaul and I’m studying business administration and management information systems (MIS). I also have a minor in business analytics, but I’m thinking of changing it to either marketing or communication. So I’m still on the fence about what I’m minoring in.
Q: Why do you want to change your minor?
A: I think I am more of a creative person as opposed to numbers. There’s so much coding involved in MIS that I wanted something that’s a little bit more vocal and communicative instead of purely digital and numbers based.
So I want to work in a field that doesn’t require me to continuously do math for the entirety of my job and instead be more creative.
Q: What made you interested in marketing?
A: I was in my school’s business club in high school for junior and senior year. I did an independent business plan my junior and senior year. I had two other partners, but I was more focused on marketing. We had to draft up a business you would want to create and we created a biomedical engineering business. I handled most of the marketing for that and senior year I did a career development initiative and I handled most of the social media and marketing to promote our events.
I also took our marketing class for a semester and I had a blast – it was one of my favorite classes all high school. So pursuing that helped me realize that’s what I’d want to do in the future.
Q: Do you have any career plans for after graduation?
A: I’m not too sure. I know I do probably want to stay in the city. DePaul is nice because my business school is downtown so I go down to the Loop twice a week to do all those classes, so interning there is not going to be too much of a hassle because I can go straight from class.
I do know I want to work for probably either cosmetics or something more female-based. I think I want to work in the beauty industry, like skincare or hair. I’d be interested in something like a project manager role..
Q: How do you plan on applying marketing techniques to your future industry?
A: I want to make more of a positive impact through my work. I chose business because it reaches so many people, and it’s the backbone of so much of what we do.
Being able to use marketing to shine a light on marginalized and overlooked communities is really important to me and working in skincare or cosmetics with such a diversity of people that use the product is really important to me too.
Q: One thing that you brought up in your essay is the idea of “marketing giving a voice to the maimed.” Can you explain how marketing giving a voice to the maimed can help people feel more seen or heard?
A: Before you used to see the same archetype of people in marketing. They might look a little bit different, but to the core, the character was the same, and the pictures were all the same.
So I think when Vaseline did their promotion to bring Vaseline to Bangladesh and parts of India, it really impacted me because that’s where my parents are from. Every time I go there, you can tell that they are in need of resources and often overlooked by their own government. So to see a company such as Vaseline show people what these nations are lacking and how you can help them is really quintessential to bringing change instead of just leaving them in the dark and not bringing awareness to problems that could arise.
Q: What do you think is missing in modern marketing tactics?
A: I’d say the one thing that is missing – and I saw this a lot with the Healing Project – is that although they do create these initiatives and these projects, it’s not really pushed and promoted as hard as I think that they should have. Like the views on the YouTube videos for the Vaseline Healing Project for Bangladesh weren’t as high as some of the ones for their other projects. I think that if we push them more towards mainstream television, or we show them in between commercials, it’d be really influential.
Most of the ones that I did see for the Healing Project were aired in Bangladesh, which is kind of ironic because that is the country that they’re trying to help. Airing it in the country isn’t really going to do that much. But if they had aired it more in the US or Canada – places that could actually donate a large sum of money – that would have had much more of an impact.
I think it was great that they made the campaign in general. It did bring awareness, but there could have been a little bit more done to push up the viewership and impact.
Q: AI has become a huge topic of conversation across all industries. How do you think AI will affect the marketing industry moving forward?
A: Actually, this is so funny because on Tuesday I had an honors program meeting for my major and one of our conversations was how AI would touch the business industry specifically and also why liberal arts had to be taught alongside business. And one of the topics that we had brought up is that although we see on the internet that AI can create different campaigns, they don’t really touch humans the way that other humans do. I think we understand ourselves the best and the data that is behind AI is just data: it’s whatever is on the internet.
But when it comes to ethos and feeling, I don’t think that a computer can really touch us in that way. It can enhance images or give you creative ideas of what you want to do with the campaign. But when it comes to how the campaign reaches other people, I think that’s part of the reason why creative fields probably wouldn’t be replaced by artificial intelligence in the way that more math-based or digital fields would be.
Autumn is Ayokay’s Marketing Operations Manager and oversees all client marketing work with a particular focus in digital advertising, social media, and email marketing. When she’s not juggling various client projects, she also supports internal marketing efforts to spread the word about how Ayokay can help their organization.
