Phil Lockitt

The Honors Professional Development Grant helped fund an annual benchmark trip for the Newhouse student-run advertising agency, TNH, wherein me and twelve other TNH seniors traveled into NYC to visit four of the biggest names in corporate advertising. We had the opportunity to visit Amazon’s Ad Sales team as well as three advertising agencies: Digitas, Saatchi & Saatchi, and Grey. Each company gave us a quick overview of their day-to-day work and provided a panel of Advertising professionals—including many Syracuse alumni—to answer our questions related to the industry. We wrapped up each visit with an open networking session, providing an unparalleled in-person networking experience for the students that attended.

I greatly appreciated how the panelists at each company gave very genuine, insightful advice regarding the steps for incoming graduates, some of which were entirely new to the group and me. Of course, Newhouse puts a great emphasis on networking (and provides resources to bolster our ability to do so successfully), but actually hearing from these company recruiters about their suggestions for networking provided hands-on advice that was directly applicable for not only the advertising industry but the specific companies we visited. Additionally, the panelists at each company were generally very well-informed about the nuances of their job roles and provided detailed answers to questions about their roles or day-to-day work that exceeded any information we could take away from a textbook.

I was fortunate enough to connect with some panelists at a few of the companies about the topic of Zero-Party data, the primary focus of my Honors Thesis. Even a brief discussion in-person allowed me to get their valuable opinions on this industry-relevant topic, and a few even referred me to additional resources in their network who I expect will provide me some insight about the topic as I continue to develop my thesis. Generally, everyone who attended will be developing the connections they formed during this trip to accelerate their own personal job search progress and grow their personal network, which is an incredibly valuable step forward in such a connections-reliant industry. Overall, I loved helping facilitate this two-day trip for TNH and our seniors. Not only did it provide me with incredibly valuable logistical and outreach-related experience, but it also gave me extremely valuable insight to the ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ of getting a job in the advertising industry.