The week before he earned his bachelor’s degree in May, Naveen Jindal School of Management senior Josh McKinley capped his UT Dallas career by earning the 2014-2015 Collegiate Marketer of the Year award from the Dallas/Fort Worth chapter of the American Marketing Association.
The award recognizes excellence in collegiate marketing leadership, and McKinley, now a new BS in Marketing alumnus, is the third Jindal School student to earn it since 2011.
A marketing campaign that McKinley and a team of fellow JSOM students implemented for independent-study credit was the basis of his marketer-of-the-year application.
“It truly was a team competition, and everyone on our team played an equally important role,” McKinley said about the semester-long AT&T Campus Brand Challenge. The annual challenge pits university teams against one another in efforts to increase awareness of various AT&T products and services.
McKinley took part in the 2014 challenge, which focused on AT&T student discounts. For the JSOM team, McKinley managed a website, took charge of surveys for pre- and post-campaign research, and oversaw a raffle that required students to interact with new technology.
“Josh used some real cutting-edge platforms, which are, even now, still very much in early adoption stage by most companies,” Alex Edsel, director of JSOM’s MS in Marketing program and team advisor, said. “Josh created, for example, an iBeacon campaign — which uses proximity-based marketing and an app — and another campaign that used QR codes for a mobile-based quiz game and raffle.”
McKinley looked for support from fellow team members Ganapath (Ramu) Velu, the 2013-2014 DFW AMA Collegiate Marketer of the Year award winner; Evan Allen; Amy Dollin; Cody Mains; and P.K. Premvetty.
The brand challenge “was a great campaign to submit because it gave us the opportunity to put together a real marketing campaign that we actually implemented on our campus,” McKinley said.
McKinley’s Collegiate Marketer of the Year bio notes that “at the start of the campaign only 15 percent of students were aware” of the student discount.” Post-campaign surveys showed that awareness had increased to 40 percent.
“The judges really were impressed by both our efforts with the campaign’s implementation as well as the results we achieved,” McKinley said about DFW AMA judges’ comments. “We had a lot of stats to back up the effectiveness of our campaign, and that was what I think tipped the scales in our favor.”
“Josh is a very bright and personable guy who always has a good attitude and a ready smile. I expect him to go far in his career, and it’s so satisfying to see such a person receive the Collegiate Marketer of the Year Award,” Julie Haworth, director of the Jindal School’s undergraduate program in marketing, said.
A member of the marketing honorary society Alpha Mu Alpha, the academic honor societies Golden Key International Honour Society and Delta Epsilon Iota, and the Davidson Management Honors Program, McKinley graduated cum laude with major honors
A job as a business development rep at AppDynamics, a San Francisco-based application performance-management company, awaited him upon graduation.
“My role as a [business development rep] is to focus on growing AppDynamics’ business within the managed-service space, working with companies large, such as Xerox and Verizon, and small,” McKinley said. “My goal is to build relationship with both existing clients and prospective ones, while managing some current customers and handling various other responsibilities.”
