E-Journal #1: Caroline Berryman
A Digital Media Marketing Case Study
As some of you may be aware, I’m currently enrolled in the Digital Media Marketing program at George Brown College.
As part of the program, in our seminar course, we have the opportunity to hear from several guest speakers over the course of the semester in order to learn from their experiences in the industry and ask questions related to their field. The first of these speakers, Caroline Berryman, has worked as the director of marketing, communications and community engagement for York Region, specifically within the context of Transportation. It was truly fascinating to hear from someone with such a broad scope in their work, particularly within the context of marketing — as Ms. Berryman explained, her role was rarely limited to one specific area, and although she is focused on transportation, as a marketer, she is often called on to aid and assist with the messaging for other areas as well. For example, she pointed out that since the start of the pandemic, her team has also been tasked with improving the messaging and communications to the public with regards to the topic of mask wearing. I found this particularly interesting, because to me, it highlights the way in which marketers are rarely focused on one area exclusively — as well as the broad scope of work that marketers may be expected to do.
Another topic that Ms. Berryman touched on is the unprecedented amount of change that is currently happening within the marketing industry. While we’ve all heard about this in the broad scope (e.g, the rise and importance of social media vs. traditional advertising), it was also very interesting to hear Ms. Berryman touch on the way that people’s individual needs and desires will regularly change and shift as well. In addition to this, Ms. Berryman also addressed the importance of partnerships within the context of marketing — and the benefit it can bring to both sides, through increased reach, decreased costs, and improved messaging. Personally, I found this to be a particularly important point — I hadn’t necessarily considered how important of a role partnerships can play in marketing, particularly within the public sector. I say this because Ms. Berryman also pointed out the fact that as a public sector employee, her team often lacks the budget or resources they might want or need in order to effectively get their messaging across. In such a way, partnerships with other brands and companies allow her team to bridge those gaps, which stood out to me as a significant insight from Ms. Berryman’s presentation.
With that said, however, I was not entirely impressed with the results of the ‘Visibility Campaign’ that Ms. Berryman offered as an example of her team’s work. The campaign is/was meant to improve awareness and education with regards to the issue of pedestrian and cyclist safety on the roads and streets. Unfortunately, I found this campaign to be disappointing for multiple reasons — the first of which is that the materials produced for the campaign, such as a handful of educational Youtube videos, have clearly performed poorly (2 of the videos have less than 1,000 views between them, over a period of more than a year). This suggests to me that Ms. Berryman’s team could’ve put more time and effort into promoting these videos on various platforms, or into improving the messaging surrounding these videos. Furthermore, after watching the videos, I found I personally disagreed with the main messaging used — in my opinion, the videos that Ms. Berryman’s team produced put the onus of responsibility for pedestrian safety on the victims (pedestrians) rather than those most commonly at fault (drivers). As a result, I found that I quickly disregarded the messaging found in these videos — which stands out to me as an issue, when it comes to marketing and communications. As such, I intended to ask Ms. Berryman why her team chose to go that direction with their messaging — though unfortunately, due to outside circumstances, I was unable to bring up these points at the time.
Overall, while I found Ms. Berryman’s presentation to be quite interesting and informative, it unfortunately did not encourage me to pursue a career in marketing within the public sector. I found that while it sounds very fulfilling and can provide the opportunity for a wide variety of different campaigns, it also struck me as though it could be quite frustrating. Between Ms. Berryman’s comments about the ever-changing nature of people’s needs and desires, and the budget/resource challenges her team has faced, I suspect that I would struggle in such a position due to feeling as though I couldn’t effectively disseminate the necessary messaging for a campaign. By the sounds of it, the private sector is more my style!
