Name: Palmer Brown
Major: Advertising
Age: 21
Hometown: Doylestown, Pennsylvania
Student Status: Senior
Q: How did you land the job as Martin Hall Agency’s president?
A: To be completely honest the job basically fell into my lap. In August, before school started I met with Professor Jim Ebel to discuss the idea of starting a student run ad agency in the Journalism school. We came up with a few flyers to get students interested in joining which resulted in about thirty new members. Our first order of business was to hold elections and I guess due to the fact that I had put in work to help start the agency I was rewarded with the position of president.
Q: What are some of your day-to-day duties as president?
A: As far as my day-to-day schedule goes with the agency, I do a whole lot of text messaging and writing on Facebook in order to make sure everyone in the agency is kept up to date with existing and new projects. If it weren’t for social media and text messaging my job would be a lot tougher.
Q: Can you tell me a little bit about the National Advertising Competition that the Martin Hall Agency is currently participating in?
A: I’m super excited to be working on the National Student Advertising Competition with a number of members from MHA. Being able to work on a campaign that could be picked up by Nissan is a tremendous opportunity that few students at our university will ever have. We’ve been working for a few months now doing every step that a professional advertising agency would take in order to execute an effective campaign that you would see on TV or in a magazine.
Q: What made you choose advertising as your major?
A: I can credit two people for me being an advertising major, Mr. Meo and Mrs. Sawyer, both who were teachers of mine in high school. It was in their classes that I was first exposed to Photoshop, which led me to designing fake advertisements for fun. After a while of designing fake ads I began to get pretty good at it so I thought that graphic design may be the major for me. It wasn’t until I was looking at the courses that I would take and realized that I would have to take wayyyy too many drawing classes than I could handle so I went with the major that I thought would be similar and advertising is where I ended up. Luckily I fell in love with every aspect of advertising, and wouldn’t imagine wanting to major in anything else.
Q: What would you recommend to other students about getting involved?
A: DO IT! I’ve heard so many excuses about why people “can’t” get involved. Some say that it’s too early, some say it’s too late, but to be completely honest, any time is the right time to get involved. I’m mad at myself for not getting involved earlier in my college career because the amount of connections you can make are endless.
Q: Besides being President of the Martin Hall Agency, what other activities do you like to participate in?
A: If it has the possibility of being the slightest bit fun I’ll give it a shot. I’m a big fan of anything from playing sports to playing scrabble. If you play words with friends, bring it on, the names ‘hughyb’ (Hugh is my first name). I’m constantly listening to music and I think my music taste is as broad as anyone’s. I’ve been a HUGE Jimmy Buffett fan since birth so I have to say that he’s my favorite but I’m also a big fan of country, rap, and oldies. I’m a big time dog person as well and I have 3 black labs (mixes) at home, all of who provide my family with some fantastic stories and fun.
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at WVU chapter.