Elisa, the Rock Doc

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been surrounded by advertising campaigns. My mother worked as an executive assistant to various ad execs for almost half of my life. I was part of focus groups, took part in the Pepsi Challenge on numerous occasions, and I can list a voice-over for a Puerto Rican newspaper as my first official gig. My brother dressed up in mascot outfits to hawk everything from Nesquik to Chef Boyardee for the company. I remember the sneakiness with which we had to eat out. We couldn’t eat at Church’s Chicken within a certain radius of the agency—-we had to be a KFC family where it counted.

When I began my transition into adulthood, my mom called in a favor at the agency and got me a job as a receptionist in the Miami office. While I didn’t enjoy the actual position itself, I loved being a part of the agency culture. I’d stay late to help film focus groups, and I was almost considered to move up to a traffic position. Grad school came calling soon after, along with a position at a college. The college gave me an opportunity to teach during the summer, so I jumped at the chance. A few years later, I’m a full-time doctoral student of sociology.

I still haven’t forgotten my days “in advertising” and get especially nostalgic for it around Super Bowl commercial time. These recent gigs as a Frag Doll Cadette and budding sociologist make me even more cognizant of just how much of our social development and opinions about the world are developed through advertising/marketing/PR. Last week, I gave a lecture on gender socialization and used popular ads and marketing campaigns as examples.

These two particular sides of me are very closely interlinked, and will become even more so as I go through another round of demoing games for Ubisoft and attending industry events. “Because games matter,” to borrow from web series Extra Credits, I want to learn more about marketing/advertising/PR so that I can have a practical application for my sociology doctorate and do my part (as small of it as it might be) to have companies rethink marketing choices that could alienate potential consumers and be implicit in discriminatory socialization messages.

Marketing, PR, advertising gurus: Any idea of where I could start learning the basics?