NYU Digital Media Intellect (GY)

Updated Scheduling Note for Spring 2025: Meetings will be held in Brooklyn on Thursdays from 4:00-5:00PM.

This project-based learning course immerses students in the world of social media marketing by simulating the real-life experience of working in a social media marketing agency. Participants collaborate in small teams to develop content strategies, create engaging static and video content, and manage and analyze campaigns. Ultimately, the goal is to explore best practices for creating, executing, and optimizing organic social media content, targeting multiple audiences – including prospective students, current students, faculty, and alumni – for a real-life program, Tandon's Integrated Design and Media program, across different channels, with a focus on Instagram and TikTok.

This team is designed to help students develop marketing, design, storytelling, analytics, and teamwork experience that complements the more technical engineering skills they learn in other courses by having students create content to grow followers and engagement on real social media channels. These skills can help students distill and communicate ideas more effectively and benefit entrepreneurial initiatives and career advancement, while also providing a user-oriented framework to apply beyond marketing to product development and other areas.

It is related to the Tandon Emerging Media Area of Research Excellence

Goals are to:

• Identify clear strategic objectives for the team
• Develop a framework for outlining the target audience(s), desired outcome(s), and key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Create an editorial calendar and experiment with various content types against the calendar across multiple digital platforms, including images and video
• Analyze results against the established goals and KPIs, and rethink and refine their approach and execution accordingly semester over semester

Skills explore are:

• Strategy & messaging
• Graphic Design
• Video Production
• Copywriting
• Data Analysis

Digital creative tools include, but are not limited to:

- Canva

- Adobe Creative Suite

- Filmmaking and animation tools (e.g., Premiere, After Effects)

- Native app tools (e.g., trending audio or filters)

Please note that no prior social media marketing experience is required, nor is being part of the Integrated Design and Media program, but participants should have a demonstrated interest in graphic design, video production, copywriting, or analytics.

Primary Instructors

• Lauren Ptak (NYU Tandon - Chief Marketing Officer)
• lauren.ptak@nyu.edu

• Rebecca Leopold (NYU Tandon)
• rml444@nyu.edu