MGT-6311 - Digital Marketing
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Reviews
This is a very easy class, but still valuable especially if you would like to use your DS skills for marketing in the future.
You get what you put into this course. I am in the Digital Advertising industry, so this course served as a nice refresher but also expanded my knowledge of certain media channels that I don’t work closely with. Burnout is a real concern for many students who also work full time (not to mention have family responsibilities), so this course is helpful to mitigate that while familiarizing students with the Digital Advertising “landscape”.
I would consider this an “intro” course. I would love if OMSA eventually created an Advanced Analytics/Modeling course that focused on models that are often utilized in this industry, such as Marketing Mix Models (MMM), Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA), Look-Alike Models, and more.
Super easy class, with interesting content, and a very active professor. Great class to take if you want a relaxing semester (or if you want to pair with a difficult course). I have a full video review, where I go into more detail about the course on Youtube here.
If you’re looking for the path of least resistance to an OMSCS degree, this is exactly the class for you.
By far the easiest course in the program. The difficulty gap between SDP and CV is comparable to the gap between this class and SDP.
Could easily take two other classes and this one in a semester.
If your goal is to learn something, that’s probably doable as the content of the course is quite practical. And if your goal is to learn nothing then this is a great option as well.
tl;dr Easy kill, I am straight but the Prof’s bald head turns me on.
A must-take class even if you are not from the OMSA Business track. If you are in that track, you better take it and not try to skive around by taking low-value classes like 88x3, where x =/= 0.
Take this class seriously, guys. Even though the workload is low, it’s meant to be like that so you can easily experiment things in real life, and worry less about the grades. Think of this as an CS 8001 seminar but with 3 credit hours and easily creditable as an elective. My reported workload reflects the time used for minor case, major case, exams and field experiments (which are ungraded, but hey, they are great life hecks!).
My honest comment is that, do not attempt to cheat and try to use “other sources” to copy and paste the comments on the cases. They do use TurnItIn, but extremely discreetly and blacklist you until you realize it too late into the semester. Same goes for the exams - Michael Buchanan does refresh his videos here and there each semester, so you will be in for a nasty surprise. Another option they might use is that they can track which student did not pay for the case study package, from there, they would easily know who are the ones who obtained it from those “ahem” sources. Do a combination of these, and the OSI would come knocking on your door.
I learned the ideas of Digital Marketing and put them onto an experiment onto my Tinder account. My number of likes did increase exponentially. I know this is a humble brag but a brag nonetheless - but hey, things actually do work.
Michael Buchanan is a leading practitioner in the field. Attend his office hours, they are a gem.
This is a very easy class. However, easy does not mean you won’t learn a lot. It’s been one of my favorite courses so far because it felt like the intersection of computing and business. Mid term and final are heavily weighted and can drop your grade even if you get 100% on every other assignment. It pairs very well with other classes and I would definitely take this class again.
I enjoyed this class! I think it’s increasingly relevant and good knowledge to have no matter what your role is in your job since all companies do digital marketing to some degree.
I would recommend reading the lecture transcripts and following along with the powerpoint slides vs listening to the lectures. It goes much faster this way. I did read all the lecture material week-by-week but I did NOT take notes in a notebook as I went. Before the tests, I reread all the transcripts again and created a Quizlet set which I used to study.
There are weekly homeworks, most of which are “short case studies” from the textbook where you answer a few questions in a post on Canvas and then comment on another student’s response. These were fairly quick to do. It’s just important to keep up with them as you had to post by Thursday night and comment by Sunday evening. Most people just immediately commented after they posted and I would recommend that.
The other weekly homework assignments were five “major case studies.” These all fell on weeks without lectures which was helpful. These required a 2-4 page response and did take longer than the short case study responses but weren’t too bad. Note: some students got caught for plagiarism on these cases so beware they check for that.
I did feel like with all the homework assignments I was kind of making up a response based on common sense and my own experiences. I would read the lectures first and sometimes draw facts from them but oftentimes I was drawing on my own experiences and intuition more.
I viewed the class as the lectures being the main material and the textbook being supplementary, but Professor Buchanan did say on piazza before the final that the textbook chapters were required reading. I didn’t see them as necessary for most of the semester until I was taking the final and felt like some of the questions did not come from the lectures and must have only been in the textbook. So beware of that! I still made a 95% in the class, though!
Easy class which I finished in the first 2 weeks of class. However, reviews here fail to mention the weightage of the exams. They are worth 30% each, for a total of 60% of your grade. A single question wrong may mean 1-2% of your final grade. They are not hard but I did not think they were a cakewalk either. I got a high A on the first one and a high B on the second one. I did have to sit down and memorize a bunch of stuff for them for several hours. You may be able to get decent scores without studying through process of elimination, but it will probably not be a fun experience.
This class is fairly straightforward and pretty interesting. Overall you can watch the videos and skim the textbook and get about 85% of the way to an A. A little further effort is needed to read parts of the textbook for some random questions on the exam, so I would recommend taking a quick look at some of the more complex topics in the book.
I finished almost all of this course in 3 days, I basically sat down the first weekend for a marathon session and blasted through everything (I doubled up with the practicum this semester so wanted to get this class done as fast as possible). Definitely doable except you may need to wait for a couple of weeks for other students to catch up so you can write discussion responses to them.
If you are at all interested in the business side of things this is a fairly interesting class and I would recommend it.
Most of the other reviews for this course are accurate. It’s a solid digital marketing class. Even if you’re in the industry, it’s great to fill in some of the gaps on things that you may not know much about (i.e. I work at Google, so many of the lessons on Search, Display, and Video were less relevant to me. That said, I did learn quite a bit in the Social Media and Email modules, and it was also helpful to holistically see the digital plane from a marketer’s perspective).
The class is easy, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. Max 5 hours of work per week, and that’s only if you have a Major Case due. I got an A despite never looking at the textbook (I did watch and take notes during all the lectures and study them). I took this class alone during a personally tumultuous semester (moved across the country) and I probably still could have handled a second more quantitative class alongside it. That said, still glad I took it.
Also, I didn’t take advantage of this, but the fact that the class is self-paced (i.e. all material is released on day 1, so you could hypothetically take the entire class in a few intense days) is a really nice plus. I would have preferred this in earlier semesters when I had midterms/finals occurring the same week as weddings and job interviews.
This course has a good reputation, and it is well earned. I enjoyed this class almost as much as Simulation. The course covers the basics of digital marketing (paid ads, organic search/SEO, paid search, video, email, social, etc.). The course involved 5 major business case reviews, and 10 minor ones. The minor business case reviews were about 1 hour of work, plus writing one peer review. The major business cases were a few hours, and no peer reviews. There were 2 exams including one midterm and one non-cumulative final. The exams were a total of 60% of the grade, and the business case write-ups the remaining 40%. Study involved watching the very well done videos, reading the pretty good (but not great) textbook, which is free online as a PDF. The instructor is passionate about the subject, an excellent communicator and was engaged and present for the office hours in person. Office hours are offered twice per week. The TA’s were pretty much behind the scenes, but no complaints. The course opens completely on the first day, so you can go at the scheduled pace, or move faster if you wish. I stuck with the regular pace for the first couple of weeks, and then just put my head down and finished the entire thing in about half a summer session. I did OK on the midterm. I studied much harder for the final and managed a 100%. (This was my first and only 100% on a proctored test in the OMSA program. I hate proctored exams!) This course is not hard, but some study is required. You cannot just float by even if you are familiar with the topic. I thought I was, and I still did learn things in this course. Again, a nice course. This was my final course in the OMSA. I believe I will get an A. (A majority of students do.)
The class teaches what it seeks to, a comprehensive introduction to digital marketing. If you are new to digital marketing, this is a great course to acquire the principles as it goes over a new topic in digital marketing each week. Didn’t quite live up to the level of a graduate class in an analytics program in my opinion, but I knew this coming in from the course description and reviews. Don’t expect this class to have applied practice of digital marketing analytics for analysis. It is a good class to learn the concepts, tools, and examples in digital marketing. All the course content is available from the beginning so the class is flexible and overall a very easy class.
This is a good course to learn about marketing, as applied through digital channels - a few are email, social media, mobile and video. Each week, we learn about a channel - features, benefits, and some associated costs.
For each topic, there is an associated “mini case” - a look at how a company used a channel to reach a goal - sometimes the objective of marketing is not just “more sales”.
In addition to these, there are 5 major cases - a more in-depth look at a marketing case study. What I like about these is it got me to think about the approach, and do some outside searching to learn more.
There are 2 exams, each worth 30%. Each was about 35 multiple-choice questions. It’s a little unsettling going into the exam, because it’s closed book and there are no “practice tests” to get an idea of what to expect. But I found out that if I had read the assignments and watched the lectures, I was able to answer most of them without feeling tricked.
These are topics which I feel I can put to use in our business.
The professor, Michael Buchanan, was active in the Piazza forum and ran all of the office hour sessions (there were 2 each week). He enjoys talking about marketing and other topics - even topics which are not directly related to the coursework.
One nice thing - all course lectures and assignments were released at the beginning of the semester, so we can work ahead as fast as we want. This would help students who are concerned with scheduling class around family or work events.
I am from OMSCS and midway through the program. I can directly relate this content to my work as how marketing would be creating campaigns for the product I work on. I am really happy that I selected this course. The instructor is fabulous and lectures are very to the point.
Workload is comparatively light but who says students need to grind hard to learn and complete a degree while working full time and having families (at least in my case). I wish there were such courses in OMSCS as well.
This course has two exams. Each of these exams carry 30% marks and essential to doing well in the course. You need to watch lectures and read dedicated chapters from text book for exams. Most likely if you don’t prepare hard but attempt everything in course you should end up with B or best case - A.
Rest of 40% marks come from weekly discussions or case studies which I really enjoyed.
I highly recommend. Its a great course whether you want to pair it with other on just want to learn about digital marketing.
Pros: 100% front-loadable, everything is released on the first week and there were people who finished the whole course in a few weeks. (Spring 2021) . Awesome lecturer! Present throughout the course in canvas and piazza, friendly and welcoming. TAs are great too. My only regret is that I could not find enough time for interactions. If you are completely new to digital marketing, I think there is a lot of things to learn. Two short proctored exams, non cumulative, closed book, can be finished < 1 hour.
Cons: From an OMSCS perspective, not comparable to the heavyweight courses that you usually get for the same fees. It is an easy A, and there are definitely things to be learned, but in the end I am left with a feeling that I cheated a bit by taking one of the easiest OMSA courses. But yeah definitely a great course to relax a bit and prevent OMSCS burnout, it was a better option to me compared to skipping a term.
Textbook: The RedYellow textbook could be a valuable resource , depending on what you are trying to achieve. But it is very verbose and occasionally resembles something that an average copywriter would write to fluff up a bullet list to 10 pages- things like “20 benefits of mobile channel”. Most of which are common-sense stuff. If you already have a big-picture idea how digital marketing works, you will have to actively fight boredom and sleep if you try to go through all chapters and lectures before the exam. (which you can actually postpone until right before the exam, since the weekly assignments are based on case studies in the textbook and the paid HBR case studies, and does not “require” the lectures or chapters per se. I did it successfully for weeks 7-13 and should be possible for weeks 1-6 as well)
I think this was a great class! I really enjoyed the subject matter. The homeworks felt a bit like busy work, and yes, you can complete everything in the first few weeks if you wanted. But since I actually enjoyed the material, I was happy to go slower and deeply understand it. This is one of those “you get out of it what you put in” classes. I’m a FE engineer, so this course was surprisingly relevant to me, as one of my goals is to get my website in the hands of more users. I’ve already taken some of the things I’ve learned back to my team and am making changes based on the material.
It’s an easy class. Which was perfect for me, since I paired it with ML. 10/10 would take again.
Class is released on day 1, so you can finish the entire course in 3 days if you grind. I tracked my hours and spent about 35 hours between watching lecture videos, writeups and studying / taking exams. It’s super easy and the content is interesting but too easy. You can learn all of this stuff on your own in a few hours. There’s a review that says no study for exams is needed, but I felt that study (2-3 hours) was needed to do well.
For those interested in Digital Marketing this class is fantastic and provides an excellent overview of all Digital Marketing topics. If you are looking for an easy class to pair with a harder class this is also a good option.
Homework: Weekly discussion post & response to classmate 5 Case Studies
Exams: 2 Midterm and Final No notes on either exam - 90 minutes
All homework, case studies and exams are opened on day one of the class. This made it easy to get ahead in the course.
I went into this class expecting (and hoping) for it to build upon the R-based sections of the marketing elements of MGT6203 (Data Analytics in Business), working through more and more specific examples of analytics-based marketing techniques.
But it isn’t this. It is - and I would have known this had I read these reviews or looked at the syllabus - basically an overview of digital marketing areas and types, something you could broadly take away from just reading the textbook utilized heavily in the course.
So a missed opportunity in my mind to take a business course into a more technical and applied (and thus interesting) area of analysis. But for what it was it was still interesting. The lectures are good, and the weekly mini and every 3 week larger case studies did require some applied thought. It is quite easy though, and the two multiple-choice (<30 minute) exams are written in such a way that even a cursory understanding of the material would be enough to get an 80 (and also nearly memorizing everything would still make it tough to exceed a 95). I took this alongside CSE6040 and I spent more time in an average week on that course than I did for this one in its entirety.
This course was incredibly easy, especially if you have passing familiarity with basic marketing concepts. If you have marketing knowledge and need to “check a box” to earn credit, this course will do the trick. I didn’t study for either exam and earned an 88% on the first exam and a 92% on the final. They were both common sense and easy to determine the right answer based on process of elimination.
If you’ve never been exposed to digital marketing principles, you might find this class a bit challenging because there’s a lot of vocabulary and acronyms to remember. If you have some background knowledge, you’ll find this class fairly straight-forward.
Weekly work consists of video lectures, some reading and a mini-case study. Some weeks add a larger case study. If you pay attention to the videos, you’ll do fine in the course. The readings add a bit of color and additional information.
Don’t go into this class expecting to build models in R and/or Python. Essentially, it establishes a baseline of what you might need to know if you decide to work in the field of digital marketing. This is great if you want to go into this field, but not terribly helpful if you have no interest.
Bottom line: Take this course if you think you might be interested in a career in digital marketing analytics. If you have zero interest in this field, take a pass on this class. Bonus: Prof Buchanan is AWESOME. Go to the office hours sessions and pick his brain. He’s a friendly guy and loves to talk, so just throw questions at him and see where you end up.
Absolutely enjoyed this course! This course may seem a bit introductory to students with digital marketing experience, but for others this will allow you to look at ads a whole new way.
Course structure: concise weekly video lessons, weekly case analysis write up, few major case analysis about 3 pages long, 2 exams (summer semester)
One of the easiest course in OMSA. We had to post a 3 para discussion every week and make a comment on one other post. And there were 5 case studies for which we had to write 3 pages. Honestly, I think they just graded based on the length of the response rather than the content. Take this course if you want an easy A. I didnt learn much but that is also because I was taking a harder course at the same time and work was tough. The material is interesting but you will have to self motivate to learn it.
I thoroughly enjoyed this class. Lectures were short, sweet, and informative. I learned a lot of theoretical knowledge and terminology about the digital ad space. The assignments were very straightforward.
This was yet another easy, yet good, course for those of us doing the business analytics option. I have some experience in the digital marketing area so I suppose this was easier for me than it may have been for others. Still, I learned a good bit and came away with some great resources for the future. In fact, the text is so well done (and it’s free) that I’ve recommended it to people at work who need a “Digital marketing 101” resource.
Digital marketing and, indeed, marketing in general, can benefit greatly from advanced analytics. A/B testing, optimization, simulation, regression modeling of all kinds, are common place for top marketing teams and agencies.
You will have the ability to learn many of these topics throughout the OMSA program, but the foundational, domain, knowledge about digital marketing in general can be learned in this course. It’s an easy one, the prof seems genuinely enthusiastic about the subject.
As a final note: you will do actual honest-to-god written work where you’ll be challenged to think creatively about a given case study, while the exams are MC.