You’re going to really like this one folks!
How do you manage teaching in the age of AI? Does traditional media still have value with the rise of streaming and other online focused content?
We are talking about that, and so much more, in today’s interview with Hannah Frisch!
Contact Hannah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-frisch/
Hannah’s Plug: https://www.ama.org/
About Hannah:
Specializing in digital marketing, education, and community leadership, Hannah helps brands grow through strategies that blend creativity with data-driven results. As Co-President of AMA Saint Louis and Founder of Frisch Digital, she leads initiatives that connect, mentor, and inspire the next generation of marketers while building innovative campaigns for clients. Hannah also serves as Digital Marketing Manager at Ecolink and Adjunct Professor of Marketing at Webster University, and Secretary of the Southern Illinois University – Carbondale School of Marketing & Management Advisory board, bridging industry insights with academic growth. With experience spanning SEO, content, brand strategy, and community engagement, Hannah thrives on creating meaningful connections and driving impact for organizations that value purpose and growth.
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes:
https://www.youtube.com/@TheMarketingGateway
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Sean Jordan (00:08)
Hey, it’s Sean and St. Louis and welcome back to the Marketing Gateway. And today we have an interview with someone you’re really going to love. Her name is Hannah Frisch and Hannah is the co-president of our local chapter of the St. Louis American Marketing Association, which is where I know her from, but she does so many other things and you’re going to get to hear it in this interview. She’s the founder of Frisch Digital. ⁓ She is a digital marketing manager at Ecolink. She’s an adjunct professor of marketing at Webster University and teaches
students about marketing and she’s actually working on a consumer behavior class right now. And she’s also the secretary of the SIUC School of Management and Marketing Advisory Board that’s Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, if you didn’t know. beyond that, just a great resource on marketing topics in general. So we had a great discussion. I can’t wait for you to hear it. Here we go.
Sean Jordan (01:02)
All right, well here we are in the Marketing Gateway with Hannah Fritch, and I’m Sean in St. Louis, of course, and Hannah, welcome.
Hannah Frisch (01:09)
Thank you for having me, Sean. I’m so excited to be here today.
Sean Jordan (01:12)
And I like to begin every one of these that we do by just asking our guests to tell me something surprising that I don’t know. Anything you’d like to share. So tell me something surprising here.
Hannah Frisch (01:22)
Well, there was one thing I thought I was going to talk about, but where I’m sitting and where I’m looking in my current apartment, I’ve been doing, I’ve been building an aquarium for the past. ⁓
fourish months or so. And one interesting thing I’ve really learned is just like co-inhabitation of different kinds of fish. And we have shrimp in our tank. And fun fact, shrimp really shouldn’t be in a tank with everybody else because we’ve been experiencing like a slow fade out of every shrimp that we have. And it’s been a lot of interesting research being just in the marketing side of things. This is obviously more science related for me. So just kind of like understanding that process. I had tanks when I was little and you just kind of throw the fish in it and just expect them to live.
and the second time around as like a full-fledged adult, it’s really interesting learning like how to keep the tank up, how to make the biology right. I work for a chemical company, so I have to do a lot of, you know, chemical testing on the water. So that’s just something, something fun that I don’t think people really realize when they’re like, I’m just gonna get a fish, that’s gonna be so easy. It’s really not. I’m here to say that it’s not as easy as people think it is.
Sean Jordan (02:21)
And you know, I I had
sea monkeys when I was a kid, right? So those are brine shrimp, and those were impossible to take care of. So I would never even dream of trying to take care of a full-size shrimp. So good for you for trying. Well, in this series on the Marketing Gateway, we’re really focused on the St. Louis area. So tell me a little bit about how you came to live and work in the St. Louis area.
Hannah Frisch (02:24)
Whoa! Yeah!
Yes.
you
Yeah, so my roots in St. Louis go really deep. My family has lived within Illinois, Missouri area up since way before I ever existed. My dad worked up here in the 90s for HOK, which is an architecture firm that’s downtown. They’re famously known for doing the Edward Jones dome at the time that he was working with the company. And my mom worked for a UMB bank downtown and then they moved back to southern Illinois. And during that time period, my grandparents purchased a condo in Sularg.
which was right across the street from Anheuser-Busch. So was easy to go over and see horses. So I spent a lot of my younger time up here in St. Louis, coming to their place. They lived in Southern Illinois as well. So we kind of bounced back between the two places. And we had family who lived up near Chicago and we’d all always meet here for the 4th of July. So this was always known as like a vacation spot for me because my hometown of Carbondale, Illinois is a university town, but it’s very, very small. ⁓ And so when I graduated with my undergrad from SIUC, I decided
I’m like, I’m familiar with St. Louis. I love St. Louis. I want to just live up here, have a, you know, a wider market to spread across. And so in April of 2021, so it’ll be coming on five years this year, I moved up here full time and just kind of planted it. I’ve moved around and finally I’m in home ownership as of this past year. So finally have my roots really like firmly planted in the community. But that’s kind of the long and the short of how I made it all the way up to St. Louis full time.
Sean Jordan (04:12)
So, you know, I grew up in southern Illinois as well, though I grew up in the ⁓ O’Fallon, Belleville, know, Metro East area. So what do you consider like the dividing line between southern Illinois and the rest of Illinois? Just out of curiosity.
Hannah Frisch (04:17)
Yeah.
I call it 64 down. So 64 South is Southern Illinois to me. Because I’ve heard that before that people in El Falen are like, oh yeah, I live in Southern Illinois. And I’m like, oh, really where? Because I’m thinking you’re going to say like somewhere near Carbondale. And then they go, oh, Belleville, oh, Fallon. I’m like, yeah, technically that’s south of 64, but that’s Metro East to me. So that doesn’t, you know. And so then I’ve had so many people up here in St. Louis, know, the age old question of where you went to high school. I’m like,
Sean Jordan (04:27)
Okay.
Right.
Hannah Frisch (04:52)
nowhere around here and then they’re like, ⁓ let’s you know, and then they try to figure out where I’m from and then they say, I’m from Southern Illinois too. And then I’m like, no, you’re from the Metro East. Like I know, I know where they’re from. there, mean, there’s a lot of, you know, there’s a lot of hours between 64 all the way down to, you know, Kentucky borderline. So there’s a lot of space in there to say Southern Illinois and put quotes around it.
Sean Jordan (04:53)
You
Well, and
I just think it’s funny because where I grew up, my house was literally right next to Interstate 64. Like you can hear the traffic. I was on the north side of it. And then I ended up working at a place right on the south side of it. So I literally, by your definition, was crossing in southern Illinois every day to work. That’s pretty funny. you know, for those that don’t know the area, starts in St. Louis and then goes down to Mount Vernon and then it goes off.
Hannah Frisch (05:23)
Yeah.
Right?
you
Sean Jordan (05:45)
towards the East Coast from there. Mount Vernon, think, is kind of like the biggest city in the northern part of Southern Illinois until you get to the Metro East. So those of us that know the area would definitely recognize those landmarks. Well, I will tell you, I was up in Chicago one time in Naperville, and someone told me they went to school in Southern Illinois. And was really excited because I, of course, I have an SIUE, which is in Edwardsville. You’re at SIUC.
Hannah Frisch (05:53)
yeah, definitely.
Sean Jordan (06:11)
And I asked them which school they went to and they told me ISU, which is in Bloomington. Yeah, right. Northern Central Illinois. And it reinforced the stereotype that people from Chicago think Southern Illinois begins at I-80, which is along the northern part of the state. well, ⁓ you know, one of the other things I like to ask those of us that are around the area is what’s something about St. Louis that you wish other people knew?
Hannah Frisch (06:17)
That’s central Illinois for those who don’t know.
Right. Right.
there’s a few things. think one of the biggest things is, that there’s misconceptions about the safety of our city. ⁓ And that’s from outdated reports from a long time ago. And some people may disagree with my statement on this, ⁓ but there are very few times where I’ve really felt unsafe. And I think that St. Louis in general is a very welcoming city. That there’s such a large community around supporting local and be local and be proud to be from St. Louis or even if you’re
not from St. Louis, you know, you get embraced as a part of that community. And I just feel like if you’re looking for a city that’s, you know, it’s not New York, you’re not having to, yeah, there’s traffic around here and it is really annoying. And when my parents come back up here, they’re like, yeah, I remember why we don’t live here because of the traffic. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s a great mid-sized city that, you know, every city’s got its problems on some level. ⁓ But at the heart of it, there’s a great community to rally behind and so many different
kinds of communities that you can be involved in, from different cultures to religions, whatever, we’ve got all of it here in this, know, metro county, St. Louis area. So I think that’s really special about St. Louis. I don’t think a whole lot of people realize, especially like European cultures as well. There’s so many different historical groups for those people who have immigrated over to be a part of and find.
love for their heritage and different things like that. So I think St. Louis does a really good job of celebrating everybody from all different kinds of cultures.
Sean Jordan (08:09)
It’s so true and you know about ten years ago when the Michael Brown uprising was going on in Ferguson, which is 15 minutes from my office You know, I remember there are all these pictures of st Louis in the news of it looking like everything was on fire and I mean really everything that was happening and I Went out there and I stood with the protesters So knew what they what they were doing But everything that was you were seeing in the news was basically a two-block section in Ferguson and most of Ferguson didn’t even look like it was a lot nicer than what you saw on the news, so
Hannah Frisch (08:15)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sean Jordan (08:38)
The news coverage a lot of times is really where people get those ideas from. I mean, that was a pretty isolated set part of town. Even Carbondale, there were very famously some student uprisings that happened there during, know, drunken revelries and things like that. And people thought Carbondale was dangerous for a long time, right?
Hannah Frisch (08:43)
Yeah.
Yep, definitely. yeah,
definitely. I think it was the Old West Main building on campus, which is now just memorialized by one statue in the middle of our main campus square. But I mean, that’s one those that my dad was very little when that happened, but he could tell you all about. SIU is seen, I think both SIUs in a sense have all seen it all in terms of historical events over the years.
Sean Jordan (09:17)
No question, no question. Well,
that’s great. And I’m glad you’re in St. Louis now and glad you’re bringing a little of that Southern Illinois, you know, ⁓ knowledge and know-how up to our community here. But ⁓ I know one of the things you get to do as well now is you get to be in the classroom and you’re teaching. I teach marketing too, so it’s something I really appreciate.
Hannah Frisch (09:29)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sean Jordan (09:40)
But let’s talk about the big elephant in the room for a moment. So how are you teaching students in the age of AI? And I know this is a topic every higher ed educator is talking about right now. What sorts of advice are you giving your students about how AI should and shouldn’t be used?
Hannah Frisch (09:56)
That’s a really great question. I feel like I’ve been on so many faculty calls or just I’m also on the advisory board for the School of Marketing Management, SIUC. So it’s between Webster and SIU, it’s definitely two programs that are both having the same conversation of how do we reward ⁓ work if we don’t know if they did it? That’s the question of did you do it? And it’s one of those things where I’ve noticed even myself.
reading work, I’ve become distrustful of the things that I’m reading and I end up saying myself, like, yeah, no, that’s a really good point. And then in the back of my brain, I’m like, but did they write it? And I have found for me with my students, I’m really blunt about it. And I find myself to be, and maybe you agree with the statement, I find myself to be a very easygoing professor in the way that if students are willing to communicate the problems that they’re having with their work, if they’re struggling to learn how to do something,
that they’ll feel comfortable enough to come talk to me and not have to use something to make up the work for them to compensate for a lack of understanding. ⁓ The main thing I usually say to students, and I literally just had to give this speech this last week because the spring semester started, was I told them, said, it would be hypocritical of me to tell you not to use it because in the age of marketing that we’re in, you and I could both say we’ve used it for something. I’m sure we both have. So to tell them,
you know, no, it’s hypocritical because there’s definitely tools that help me as an instructor, you know, prepare materials or speed up the process of things that could have taken me a few days, you know, knock it down, down a slice. ⁓ So the advice that I gave to the students this semester was basically use it to aid you, but not do the work for you because sometimes some students do struggle with, you know, bringing all their ideas into one full circle.
And AI is really good at helping them summarize all these ideas that they have if they do struggle with that piece. And not everybody is great with that. And that’s OK. And I told them that, you know, at the end of the day, it’s their own critical thinking skills that they’re losing from not putting all the effort into it that they could be. But if they’re going to be using it, use it the right way. you know, I bet my final final thought to them was is that if you choose to let it do the work for you, the only person you’re going to hurt is yourself.
because you’re going to come out of school with skills that you’re missing because you didn’t pay attention to something and that could end up losing you an internship position, a job position, whatever. So from my point of view on that, I just, I really want to encourage them to use the tools because they need to know how to use it because if you looked at anything that’s on LinkedIn nowadays, it’s if you don’t know these tools, you’re behind.
Here’s all the tools you should be using. And then there’s a contradictory list to that list of tools that you’ve seen. So I told them that as like a handoff, I will show them some AI tools and walk them through it. But I really try to encourage, like try to do the work yourself the best that you can, because it’s one of those things that I was on that cusp, you know, coming out of a master’s degree right before all of that hit.
And it’s just crazy when I look back at some of the work that I’ve done and like my immediate thought now to myself was, yeah, you did that all by yourself. And now you think about these students just being able to spit out stuff every five seconds. It’s just, it’s really crazy to me.
Sean Jordan (13:15)
Well, I think one of the things that it reinforces to the students is if all I care about is the written product of your knowledge, then I’m not really assessing your knowledge. What I’m doing is I’m just making you do work in order to show your knowledge. so I think as much as we as instructors have to really think about how can we assess people in a way that gets them to show their knowledge. And I know one of the things I told you that I do is
Hannah Frisch (13:29)
Yes.
Sean Jordan (13:40)
I phased out written papers, and I love written papers, by the way. My students used to complain about how much I would make them write because I’m a writer and I like to write. now I make them do presentations where they’re on, they can do them on YouTube or they can record them on Zoom or whatever. But they just have to show me some application of the knowledge. And it’s a lot harder for them to fake that. They could. I’m not saying they couldn’t, but it’s a lot harder. that makes it, for them, I think, a little more rewarding because then they’re having to maybe write notes or
Hannah Frisch (13:43)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sean Jordan (14:09)
run things through AI or whatever and synthesize it and then talk about it, which is a skill that they’re going to need to use in the workplace, right? And so I think that’s part of where the discussions are ultimately leading is a lot of us are going, well, maybe the problem is we got too familiar with papers. But I had one professor push back and say, that’s too much grading. I have to grade all those videos.
Hannah Frisch (14:15)
Exactly.
you
Ready?
Sean Jordan (14:32)
So in terms of thinking about AI for what students could use it for the working world, do you have any guidelines you’re giving them in terms of when you’re in your career a couple of years from now, here’s what you need to know?
Hannah Frisch (14:45)
Yeah, kind of just, one thing that I love about being an adjunct professor is being able to work at the same time. you, we both have stuff going on outside of teaching that I literally said to my students as a joke, I’m like, I’m 95 % sure every time I come to class, every week of this course, I will have something from work that I can apply to what we’re learning about or a tool. I’m like, hey, I found this new tool. You should try this out. You should learn how this works. Because…
You know, all these AI tools, some of them are all in the same buckets. It’s just choosing the one that you feel works best with your workflow. So I’ve shown them comparisons of different, you know, SEO related tools or different social media related tools because it’s taking some of those long mundane tasks and bringing it together, which I was describing to them. said, you know, if you work for a smaller organization, sometimes it’s going to feel like you’re being pulled left and right in all directions. And tools like this make certain things that not
not that they’re not important, but certain things that on your priority level can bring that workload down. Because I did tell them, said, if you haven’t worked in a marketing position, when you get into one, it could feel a little overwhelming if you’re having a hard time deciding what to prioritize and what not to prioritize. So I made an effort to just kind of start introducing small tools. I started that last spring ⁓ teaching a promotional management class.
just because a lot of the students in that course were not media inclined. So I was showing them different tool, AI tools that they could use that’ll help them make video or make imagery. But if they don’t have a team like that available, here’s tools that can help you do something that you don’t necessarily know how to do.
Sean Jordan (16:26)
great advice and ⁓ you know it’s one of those things I think we’re all gonna be learning how to navigate it over the years and even asking the students once they get out in the real world how are you using it is probably gonna help guide us a lot right well let’s let’s move on to talk a little bit about marketing in general so beyond the teaching that you’re doing and you’re Webster ⁓ and ⁓ doing a great job there it seems like I know you’re getting ready are you just started a consumer behavior class is what you were saying yeah
Hannah Frisch (16:37)
Right. Definitely.
Yes, yeah,
that’s the Spring One course is consumer behavior. So excited, very excited.
Sean Jordan (16:56)
which is one of my favorite
classes that I took when I was a graduate student. I’m sure it’ll be great for your students too. ⁓ But you’re now also, you’re the co-president of the St. Louis chapter of the AMA, American Marketing Association, which, hey, I was a student member of the AMA before I was a professional member. And so, know, it’s a great group, but you’re pretty well-rounded, you know? So a lot of people fall into a single role and they kind of specialize, sometimes to the point where the need for that specialty disappears, right?
Hannah Frisch (17:03)
Definitely.
Yeah.
you
Sean Jordan (17:26)
and then they’re out of work. you are pretty well rounded. You can do a lot of different things. So how can marketers be more well rounded like you are?
Hannah Frisch (17:33)
The first thing I will plug is that when you’re very well-rounded, it makes you very dangerous, in a good way. Dangerous in a good way that you can pivot when necessary if something, like you said, you specialize in something super hard, it disappears. My background, so at SIUC and my undergrad, my ⁓ degree was in radio television and digital media. So I did marketing as a piece of it, but I was on TV, I worked on radio, we had a PBS and NPR affiliate that I would do work with.
So I got to first hand work on the plans that marketing teams were implementing to put out on traditional forms of media. So we were recording ⁓ audio for commercials for the radio, different things like that, different projects, promotional pieces that people were coming through the TV station to have syndicated out wherever they wanted it to go. And I feel like just from…
Some of the things I’ve noticed with students that to be more well-rounded is to really get involved in the creative tools. ⁓ It’s a lot of people or marketers per se ⁓ work really well when they have a graphic designer with them that can communicate their ideas. And it’s one thing to know what you want and then your graphic designer be able to read your mind, but sometimes graphic designers can’t read your mind. And obviously that’s their job.
But I’ve always been good at doing mini sketches or different things like that. And I think in the grand scheme of things, marketers getting invested in media tools and media skills I think are really important to have. Because on the other hand, you’re going to be using AI tools that help you with that creative process, you also have to know what you’re putting out and how that works. I noticed, for instance, in my promotional management course that I taught that
there was a lack, I don’t want to say lack of the creative side of things, but when we were talking about all the different channels for promotion and how, know, advertisements and all these different things, and we were looking at it from a creative lens, that idea creation didn’t necessarily seem like it was there in a big scope. So it was really kind of getting those students to really like dive deep and get into that creative side of storytelling, because as marketers inherently, we’re always storytelling.
But this is taking that storytelling and learning how to visualize it, which I think is, you know, for people who may not be visual learners, to be able to visualize something is really important because when you know how the process works, it makes it easier for you to tell somebody else to do it and have a realistic expectation of how long a project like that is going to take. Because some people are like, hey, I need you to produce a 30 minute film about this and we need it by next week. In theory, could
probably be done, but if you think about the full scale of an actual video production or media production and then the editing process, kind of a handoff trade-off. So I just feel like as marketers, know, on top of being a part of the theory and knowing how to make your marketing plans, understanding the media piece, understanding the web build piece, that’s something that I think a lot of marketers don’t.
necessarily have that skill coming in either is I have so many students being like, yeah, I don’t know how to do anything with the back end of a website. And I was like, okay, well, if you work for a smaller organization where the website isn’t managed by somebody else actively, fun fact, kids, that’s you. So ⁓ just kind of, you know, seeing different skills like that, that you realize maybe in, you know, school is about theory. But in the application side of things, I think, you know, tech and media are important pieces that marketers need to have to be a
well-rounded image in my opinion.
Sean Jordan (21:14)
So, you know, it kind of sounds like one of the things that you really learn about how to be more well-rounded is just getting out there and doing things and not just hearing about them. And I think that, you know, traditional marketing, like some of the things that you mentioned that you did in school, ⁓ a lot of those skills are getting lost today because people are moving into fields like digital marketing or, you know, other things where they’re the buyers or they’re the…
the distributors of the marketing, they’re not necessarily involved in any of the creative aspects of it. It’s really the agencies that are doing that. If you’re in a role like that, how can you get more involved in learning those skills?
Hannah Frisch (21:44)
Yeah.
That’s a really great question too. So one thing that, and this is just for anybody, but it’s just doing it at home. I mean, when we live in an age of TikTok and YouTube where people are actively out every day putting content on your feeds, I’m not saying it’s showing you how to do it, but you’re watching people who don’t know how to do it every day. You know, I think at one point, this would have probably been around COVID, because everybody was trying to become an influencer at that point.
I made like a spam TikTok account just to try to make random content to spice up my editing skills, I guess, at that point. And I think that’s something I would encourage everybody to do. Make a fake account. Just put out stuff there. And if you magically go famous in the process of trying to learn something, people eat up that kind of content. Like, you know, I’ve seen people, you know, some…
Somebody I followed this year was like, how can I be more frugal? And it was like 50 days of being frugal. And she made a whole series about how she was making swaps for this and swaps for that. So I think as marketers, it’s like just literally getting hands in on it and going out and trying it and doing it or get your friends to do silly videos with you. think one of the things that pushed me towards the media realm growing up was that we grew up around this ever evolving, changing media space.
and my friends and I were obsessed with YouTube. We loved making movies. I think we made two or three, you know, one hour long films, you know, growing up. And I feel like now people just consume that content all the time instead of feeling that creative zing to go out and do it themselves. So it’s, you know, find some friends, I mean, in a school setting at least, or in like for AMA as an example, in a professional organizational space, there’s gonna be people that are doing that kind of content. And when you’re in one of those spaces, all you have to do to say to somebody is, hey,
I wanna get more skills in this or I wanna just mess around with this. And people in those organizations and in your academic setting will help you do that. I mean, it’s not what it’s like, just you have to go out and do it by yourself. no, ask for help if you want to. I always encourage a helping hand, but I feel like too, ⁓ some people have access to LinkedIn learning. think that’s ⁓ dependent on university settings and that kind of thing.
But there’s so many different tutorials in there and YouTube is still a great source. I still stand on the YouTube hill, ⁓ you know, forever at this point that there’s so many places out there where you can decide how you want to consume that training. If you want to watch a video and do something with it, or if you just want to stand in front of a camera in your house and do some fun stuff just to learn how it works, that’s where I would encourage it to take place. It’s just really getting hands on with it and get fun with it because that’s how most people.
go viral or famous, they do it by accident. So have fun and get famous by accident is my advice for how to learn some of these tools just in the grand scheme of things.
Sean Jordan (24:39)
That’s such great advice. you know, I I learned audio editing of all things. I used to go around as a mime. I would paint my face and go around and, and so I learned audio editing so I could have a little ⁓ audio presentation that could go with me that I could act to. And ⁓ I had to learn how to use the tools for that specific purpose. And that’s the weirdest way to learn something is I’m going to be quiet so I can then have a production playing behind me that I’m going to make to, you know,
Hannah Frisch (24:53)
Yeah.
Great.
Sean Jordan (25:05)
I
don’t know what I was thinking at the time, but that kind of creativity was the kind of thing I could do when I was younger and had plenty of free time.
Hannah Frisch (25:12)
Yeah, no,
I really resonate with your audio side of things because that was my specialization was the audio and I come from a very musically inclined family and, you know, tying it into consumer behavior like the way as consumers, we remember things because of beats or because of tone or because of a jingle. You know, if you think of your most basic ba-da-ba-ba-bas with McDonald’s, you know, what you think about the sound. Sound is such an important piece and as marketers, if you’re not
Sean Jordan (25:35)
Yeah.
Hannah Frisch (25:40)
thinking about it in that way, like the things that you’re putting out, the way things sound together in a sentence, the tone isn’t there and the flow isn’t there, it doesn’t hit. So yeah, I definitely love audio theory and all those different, I took a few different classes on that when I was in undergrad. So that’s just, can nerd out on that for a whole podcast episode.
Sean Jordan (26:02)
Well, and like, so when we’re talking about traditional marketing methods, ⁓ you know, and I know you and I have had some conversations about this, like we were talking about things like broadcast and out of home, like billboards and, you know, print and things like that. A lot of marketers are going digital now and a lot of those traditional methods are going to kind of getting ignored or shoved off to the side or they’re really being just delegated over to the agencies and saying,
Hannah Frisch (26:10)
out there.
Sean Jordan (26:27)
You guys worry about those. We’re just going to focus on digital because we understand it. It’s programmatic. We can buy it. We know how it works. So how could these traditional methods be utilized more often? And what are some of these organizations that are going into digital missing by not thinking about traditional as more a part of their strategy?
Hannah Frisch (26:44)
Yeah, I mean, they should be, I mean, in the grand scheme of things, frontline, they should be utilized more often. When we’re in an age of AI and every other article you’re seeing is, how do I stay visible when AI is taking my searches? Well, a lot of businesses, unless you’re trying to reach globally all the time, are trying to reach local in the heart of it. And traditional media is helpful for local because people are, know, more people nowadays are being like, I don’t want to search with AI or I don’t want this or I don’t want that.
But there’s still people who listen to the radio. There’s still people who turn the TV on every night at that specific time to watch the news or if they’re still watching regular scheduled cable programming. ⁓ But through streaming services as well, that still fits into that traditional piece of TV advertising because it’s showing up between the streams. So I feel like radio and TV and even newspaper print, I think people kind of write that off a little bit too, but.
I always ingest the St. Louis Business Journal and ⁓ different forms of media that cover my local ⁓ news because that’s what matters most to me. And a lot of consumers are looking for those businesses that are closest to them. So for instance, just using St. Louis as our example, really utilizing radio and TV advertisements, I think it’s crucial to reach the St. Louis community. Now, if you’re trying to reach farther than that,
may want to dig into the digital piece just for advertising purposes and placement and AI overviews. But if you’re worried about not showing up in an AI overview in your local community, then really dig into those traditional forms of media because that will bypass AI. Somebody will see your billboard on the highway. Somebody will see it on cable TV. Somebody will hear it on the radio on their way to work. ⁓ And I think that in the grand scheme of things, I know at one point people are like, yes, it’s dying.
Not really. Not if you don’t want it to. You decide as the marketer that it’s not dead for your business. If you think like local, I’m just going to use HVAC companies or roofing companies or service-based businesses really benefit from traditional media well. Just thinking about every radio jingle you’ve heard or from your favorite radio stations.
You associate with the brands you want to and those brands could even be a radio station, but you’re gonna hear those local businesses in that mix. And if you’re doing traditional media right, you’re making sure that your advertisements are placed at the time that you think that your consumers are gonna be listening, like seven to eight a.m. on the weekdays, something along those lines. So in the grand scheme of things, don’t want people to dismiss it and just completely do digital because it feels like in the time that
I came into the marketing realm, it’s very digital only. And that’s why I was glad to have that radio TV piece because I felt like it gave me a little bit of a different perspective on how TV is utilized, especially public television, like PBS, and how they can uplift and promote the local community. And that’s what we did down at SIU was promoting events and businesses within the Carbondale community. So that’s just kind of a blanket example.
Sean Jordan (29:54)
Totally, totally. W-U-S-I-U, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, ⁓ you know, one of the things that occurs to me too is I think some of the faith that’s been lost in traditional media has, you know, marketing media has been ⁓ the lack of tracking. know, like we know that a certain number of people are tuning in, you know, on TV still or listening in on the radio, but we can’t track them the way we can digitally. So we…
Hannah Frisch (29:57)
Yes. Yep. WSIU TV.
Sean Jordan (30:19)
don’t get that same ROI that we can get if we have tracking metrics. And we don’t trust the Nielsen metrics anymore because we know that they’re flawed. ⁓ But yet I still talk to people that watch TV and that pay attention to commercials and start talking about commercials they’ve seen or that they’ve heard, you know, or billboards that they’ve driven by that really stood out to them. So I know it’s still reaching people, right? So I think that’s one of the things that gets lost in the discussion is
Hannah Frisch (30:26)
Yes.
Mm-hmm.
Sean Jordan (30:44)
just because we lose this tracking ability doesn’t mean that it’s valueless. It just means that maybe we need to figure out a way to make it part of a strategy as opposed to putting all our eggs in one basket with one thing that we like, right?
Hannah Frisch (30:56)
Yeah, I was
gonna say in the grand scheme of things too, when it comes to tracking, mean, at one point, digital tracking is gonna be a little blurry because when we have things like GDPR and obviously that mostly points to the European Union, but if the United States decides to do the same kind of, know, hack down on tracking, you’re gonna lose that data to people saying, no, I don’t want you to see what I’m doing in my data and all these different things. think recently, for instance, I was…
I decided I was going to get rid of Snapchat. I’ve had it for over 10 years and I was like, I don’t really need this anymore. And so I downloaded all my data. And when you really see how much data somebody has about you when you’ve been using their application for 10 years, it’s really eye opening. So when I think about tracking metrics, there probably will be a time where internet tracking, I mean, even right now in the age of AI, you can see that you’ve got referral traffic from AI, but it’s still…
very miniscule and there’s a lot of tools that tell you they say more and most of them all just show the same kind of data that they have access to. it’s still, that tracking is still new. ⁓ But I think with the traditional, you’re really looking for that brand identity as your factor of like, do people talk about you, the word of mouth and really focusing on when somebody comes in using their business, ask them how they found you. Cause that is the best question you can find. And I mean, with the company I work for,
were digital. So now I’m seeing more people saying, yeah, I found you through chat GPT. So I’m having to measure metrics differently. in the big picture, everybody’s going to have to measure it differently and the internet’s going to have its own, you know, messy bubble if anybody decides to put a crackdown on data there. So
Sean Jordan (32:40)
I heard the ChatGPT one for the first time back in December. That’s someone that found me through ChatGPT. And it was eye-opening to me because I’d never looked to see how my company was being put on ChatGPT. Actually, it was very favorable. I was happy. It was way better than I’m getting from a search engine referral. But it was interesting to learn. Well, speaking of the future, talking about the
Hannah Frisch (32:51)
Great.
Yeah, definitely.
Sean Jordan (33:05)
AI and things like that, what are some emerging trends or challenges in marketing that you’re most excited about right now and how do you see them shaping the future of our industry?
Hannah Frisch (33:14)
⁓ The one that I keep seeing going back and forth is about you know the SEO and the Geos and all the acronyms you want to put on it I think I’ve been to at least two or three different events about the same topic and everybody like one of them They said don’t pay attention to it. It doesn’t matter. The next one said pay attention to all of it It’s super important your business is going to disappear like fear tactic and then the other one was like, well, it’s gonna be important but also, you know things are gonna stay the same and You know, we see the different
data come out every day and I don’t think there will ever be maybe maybe 50, 60 years down the line, there’ll be a general consensus of how it really affected us. But it’s just happening too fast pace ⁓ to to be able to measure it properly. But I think it is a challenge in the grand scheme of things, because if you’re being fed so many different pieces of data, you’re trying to decide who you should trust. Should you trust the people within your network that you know, you know, and you’re like, hey, I respect their opinion on
everything they put out, I’m going to use that to frame how I’m doing my own SEO strategy. Are you going to read a bunch of different things and compile all that data together to make a better informed decision from 10 or 12 different sources? I’m excited about it. I remember a long time ago, my former predecessor, I remember her telling me like right when all the AI stuff started happening, she was she was heavily in SEO. And I remember her telling me like SEO is going to die.
That was like the thing she said right before she retired. She just said, SEO is dead. And you hear that everybody says it all the time and it comes up at least once a year. ⁓ I think my hot take on it is that the pre like the original iteration of SEO is dead. But I think that it’s a term that is always ever evolving and SEO companies obviously just have to shift with it. So it is a, it’s a challenge. That’s a fun challenge.
to take on just especially with when you’re looking at you know content and how it’s performing over time and if it’s showing up in AI overviews was it good content to begin with or was it just Informational is it actually pointing to the brand? So there’s all these different things that you have to juggle with SEO now Because that’s kind of a bubble I live in but I I have it I only have two arms right now But usually on a day-to-day basis, there’s about four arms on each side
But in one of those arm buckets, I’m doing the SEO side of things. So that’s like a trend and challenge that I’m enjoying really just taking in ⁓ what everybody’s trying to put out ⁓ there. The other challenge and trend, I guess, well, and I noticed this through the analytical side of things is that there’s still more, we have our already set ⁓ AI LLMs that are out there that you can mess with.
But I noticed a lot of posts the other week about how China’s working on building their own chat GPT model. can’t remember the name of it off the top of my head. ⁓ But there were posts after posts on LinkedIn about, you seeing a lot of direct traffic from China with all these different things coming around? And then somebody identified that it was their AI bots coming to scrape all of our content. So they’re trying to come after Google. They’re trying to come after chat GPT. So then it’s…
trying to decide if are the players that are on the field going to always be the players on the field? Just like Google’s kind of historically been, Google and Bing have been historically the players on the field as we shift into this AI engines, is this playing field gonna stay the same or is it gonna change? So that’s kind of one of the trends that I’m interested to see ⁓ as more countries wanna participate in the AI engine race.
Sean Jordan (36:36)
Mm-hmm.
Hannah Frisch (36:52)
if that’s gonna just become something that changes over time or if that’s gonna frustrate people who are using AI that they all feel like they’re competing against each other. now ⁓ I saw an email the other day about OpenAI doing advertisements, which is exciting and scary all in itself because most people are used to doing Bing ads and Google ads ⁓ or meta if they’re out on social.
Sean Jordan (37:09)
Yeah.
Okay.
Hannah Frisch (37:18)
but I feel like this is gonna be a really interesting, you know, switch as you decide, well, if you’re, you know, scraping content for answers, how are you gonna decide what, you know, it’s gonna be like Google where it shows up based upon an impression of a keyword or how that setup’s gonna be. And I work with different agencies and they’re all saying different things right now, right out the gate, but that’s just another one of those trends that I’m seeing is to be like, what’s gonna happen to advertising to paid media on that side of things, which in tandem could affect.
You know parts of traditional media when you think about TV placements and that kind of thing just with Google and they have all the different Placements of your ads but with AI is that gonna change something to or is an AI gonna start a streaming service? knows? At this point I honestly when I see something on LinkedIn nowadays nothing shocks me at this point Which is why for the most part I? Put LinkedIn in a little folder that I only go and check every once in a while because if I stay on there for too long I get way too overwhelmed
You
Sean Jordan (38:18)
I
hear you. I feel like everybody is having the best career possible and they all are learning these invaluable and insightful lessons from these minor interactions in their life and they all have a post about it to share with you. Well, you know, I share a lot of your both optimism and dread about where things go. And I think, you one of things I like to remind people is that
Hannah Frisch (38:28)
Right.
you
Sean Jordan (38:43)
When social media came around, for example, you had platforms like Friendster and you had platforms like MySpace and Classmates and things like that, all of which are long gone because Facebook came in and took it over and they’re meta now, of course. But the reality is you can’t really foresee the future just based on what’s popular today. And chat GPT might be a good example. It’s been the one out of the gate. It’s been the most popular. Everybody would say, oh, they have the first mover effect, but
Hannah Frisch (38:53)
You
Exactly.
Sean Jordan (39:11)
You know, all the other players that are getting in the field have caught up to them for the most part and may exceed them at some point. I was reading a piece the other day saying Google is way beyond where chat GPT is now with Gemini. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. But the point of all that being that we have to learn how to be flexible and have a think on our feet and not to get too married to any one platform, but instead to think about it in a strategy, right? And think about how it pertains to what we’re trying to do today to accomplish our goals as opposed to
Hannah Frisch (39:33)
Yes.
Sean Jordan (39:38)
getting so invested in a platform that we’re then stuck with it if it goes belly up and we have to relearn our skills, right?
Hannah Frisch (39:45)
Right, yes exactly.
Sean Jordan (39:47)
So another thing I wanted to ask you about is what you’re seeing in the classroom with the up and coming generation of marketing students. And I have a lot of opinions on this too, of course, but what are some exciting things that you’ve been seeing or hearing from them and what sorts of advice are you giving them about their eventual careers?
Hannah Frisch (40:03)
That’s a great question. So I see a mixed bag. And by that, I mean there are marketing students who will walk through the door and you’re like, they could run the next Fortune 500 company. And there are some that come through that, you know, they just wanna, they wanna be middle ground. want, you know, they want something stable. They want something this, which are all fine paths to take. I never discourage any student because most of them, for the most part, know what they wanna do.
One leverage of the consumer behavior course is that the textbook focuses on showing kids what ⁓ career paths are available based upon consumer behavior. ⁓ And I think that that’s really helpful on my side of things of giving advice because my first question is at least in that course, I’m like, you like what you learned about? Is this really exciting for you? And they’d be like, yeah, yeah, no, no, no. I like getting in people’s brains.
I’m like, boy, do I got three great career ideas, at least for you, on a pathway. And I do see a small bucket of students that feel really overwhelmed by the amount of options. You could go into web design, go into SEO, you could do brand management, content management, social media management. mean, you could go down the line of all the different buckets they can fall in. ⁓ But most of them seem to be, I know that there’s been
Sean Jordan (41:01)
Yeah.
Hannah Frisch (41:28)
discussion in the academia group about COVID and what that did to students coming through school and now them being tied into AI and how that’s affecting their work and their motivations to do work in the grand scheme of things. ⁓ Most of the students I have encountered on the collegiate level, I’ve not been concerned about that whatsoever, but those who are slightly unsure, it’s really helpful to just start.
having a conversation with them about what are the things you like. So, you like media, okay, so let’s push you towards the content side of things. Do you wanna be social media? Do you wanna help create things that engage people online? There’s so many small companies now that they put out this left field content in my mind. It’s some sort of industrial group saying this or doing some sort of training with the CEO.
So kind of just showing them some of those things. I always encourage my students, I’m like, you literally just need to talk to somebody about life advice of what career to take, you come talk to me. And I’ve done that more than once with a few students. And I feel like it’s been very helpful and beneficial to them because in the graduate level space, you’re not always getting students coming directly from a marketing undergrad. could, like for me, I came from a media undergrad. I had a student.
who was a media undergrad and she was kind of stuck on like, came to this because I want to get into more business side of things and I don’t know what to do and that kind of thing. And I was walking her through it and she decided that the social side of marketing was probably promotional social with something she wanted to do because she was interested in ⁓ gaming and different things like that. So I was able to kind of help give her advice in that direction of like, well, with my media background, here’s what I can tell you about this, this, this and this. ⁓
I feel like just in terms of trend setting, they are very hyper aware of the online community. So they come in with a new word every other week that they learn from something online. But that keeps them ahead of the curve because you’ll talk to a lot of people that you’ll mention like, hey, do you see this thing? And they’re like, no, I’m not online. ⁓ And I feel like a lot of students.
Sean Jordan (43:25)
Yeah. ⁓
Hannah Frisch (43:38)
use that to their advantage of being chronically online because it does help them decide about the things they want to do because they’re, you know, overexposed. And that is one thing I encourage. I’m like, okay, well, we’ve talked about this. Go to TikTok, go to YouTube, find some other videos about it. See if it is something you’re interested in. If you want to keep talking about it, let’s keep talking about it. But if not, and you’re settled in this, good, great, happy you found the pathway, you know, in the right direction. But I feel like nowadays
kids have become more motivated, which is the opposite that I think some people have originally argued. So, and that’s just in the business side of things. There’s probably other degrees where people are like, nope, I don’t agree with that statement, which is fine. But from what I’ve experienced with the students that I’ve worked with, especially, you we’ve been connecting a little bit with AMA at SIU, at SIUC, you know, there’s a lot of motivated students in that group who just want to, you know, go, go, go and do. So it’s really exciting and invigorating to see.
Sean Jordan (44:14)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Hannah Frisch (44:36)
students that are still that motivated to do so.
Sean Jordan (44:41)
I agree. And I really think students don’t get enough credit for many of the awesome things that they do. And I think a lot of people just look at the outlier cases and go, well, there’s these students that their parents are still showing up to advising meeting with them, they’re just blowing their time on campus. Those are not the normal students, though, that I run into. Yeah.
Hannah Frisch (45:00)
No, no, no, no, no. I think I even heard an instance
of where someone brought their mom to a job interview. I did hear that and I can’t remember where that was at, but I heard that. I will say like on the main side of advice too that I give the students that I think I might have left out was that I always tell them that just because you’ve chosen something doesn’t mean you have to stay with something. And that goes back to my very first day of my undergrad, because that was conversation with undergrad students was that on my very first day of undergrad.
Sean Jordan (45:06)
Yeah. ⁓
Very true.
Hannah Frisch (45:27)
I had a freshman freak out, like the biggest freshman freak out you could ever have. And my dad worked on campus, so I sprinted across campus and went to my dad’s office. like, I’m doing the wrong thing, because I was in film at that point. And I wanted to make movies. I loved telling stories. I wanted to be the next Steven Spielberg. You you name it down the list. And then I was in a three hour seminar ⁓ for film. And I left that going, nope, that’s not what I want to do anymore. Change my mind. Not it.
And up until that point, I had had my path laid out for me. In my mind, I was like, movies this, California, da-da. And thinking about moving that far away from my community of people now is absurd in my brain. But I’ve told students that story because I’m like, at that point, I thought that there was no pivot out. That was what the freshman freakout was about. And I’ve told students, I’m like, you can pivot wherever you want to go.
that you can do whatever you want to do as long as you, if it’s something completely polar opposite, obviously you’re gonna have to maybe get a different degree or take a certificate class or course on something. But I’m like, it’s never too late to change your mind on what you want to do. So never feel like you’re married to something because you’re not.
Sean Jordan (46:36)
was three and a half years into my journalism program in my 20s before I realized I didn’t want to be a journalist and I dropped out of school to manage a McDonald’s. And my parents were really thrilled at the time, but obviously I pivoted. I found a different career to go into eventually. So if I could do it, anybody could do it.
Hannah Frisch (46:51)
Yes.
Right.
Right.
Sean Jordan (46:56)
Well, it’s been so great talking with you, Hannah. And just one more thing I want to ask you is if you have anything that you’d like to plug, I always give guests an opportunity to plug anything. So here’s your chance. What would you like to plug?
Hannah Frisch (47:07)
I’m gonna plug AMA. ⁓ I could say a million great things about AMA, but I’ll just say three. So I started an AMA right around the time that I moved up to St. Louis. And it has been quite arguably one of the best experiences of my life in terms of connecting me with people who have connected me with other people or reconnecting with people who I didn’t know I had such close ties to. Shout out to my co-president, Marissa Lather. We had so many, know, we kind of knew of each other.
And then when we sat down, we realized we went to the same grade school, high school and college at different times. ⁓ But being in AMA has really connected me with some truly amazing people. ⁓ And not everybody’s in marketing. It’s called the American Marketing Association, but people from all walks of life come into AMA because they’re looking to work with somebody in AMA or do something outside of AMA. We’re educational. We love students who want to volunteer with us. And that’s where
Sean Jordan (47:39)
Wow.
Hannah Frisch (48:03)
you know, firsthand, I’m seeing those students who are really highly motivated to want to get involved with the industry and get involved with our association. And I feel like it’s a really great place to get experience if you’re in a career break or you’re in, you know, you’re you’re saying, I want to do more management side of things. We’ve got positions across our board for, know, you name it. It’s pretty much there.
So ⁓ I really encourage people who are looking for a career change or wanna get involved in something else, you can put it on a resume. I don’t know if people realize that, but AMA can go on a resume. And I’ve had students use it on resumes in the past. And I just feel like, if you’re new to the area, and we’ve had this more than once where somebody’s just moved to St. Louis, becoming a part of AMA can help build a small community for you. We’re all AMA people, but I consider a lot of my AMA colleagues friends.
or people that I can call upon if I need something or in an emergency. So I’ve been really thankful for my experience with AMA and I worked my way up the AMA ladder to end up as a co-president. ⁓ But that was a lot of me being like, I love AMA, I wanna do more with AMA, me more things to do. So it’s been a really fulfilling experience. So for anybody who is trying to decide, hey, I need to get involved with people, but I don’t know who to get involved with, talk to me.
You can talk to Sean, he comes to our events. ⁓ And just get involved with the community because I have found that in AMA, especially after our last coffee club, everybody at AMA knows how to find something for somebody. think everybody found some solution to the problem they were having at the last coffee club. So I felt like that was a true testament to how wide of a net. Yeah, it almost was.
Sean Jordan (49:37)
It was almost a therapy session, right? mean, everybody was just going like, hey,
we’ve got some time. Let’s tell them our problems. And Cody was so good to share some solutions. ⁓
Hannah Frisch (49:48)
Right. Right. And there were
so many people coming in. was like it was all these fairy godmothers coming out of nowhere and just everybody waving a magic wand of, this person’s got there as you saw, this person’s got there as you saw. And slowly but surely, the room just became calm. And it was everybody who had all this built up like, I’m really struggling to find this last year, found it. And so I’ve really, you ⁓ embraced the you find what you’re looking for at AMA. And I don’t know if you can say that a lot about it.
other organizations. AMA is really the only one I’ve been super heavily a part of. We partnered with other organizations. So we encourage, you know, cross organization hangout if you want to, you know, be in both groups, be in both groups. We don’t we don’t care where you float. ⁓ So that that is my biggest takeaway is that if you’re new to the area and you want to find a community of fun people who you can message whenever to, you know, just go get coffee or go get dinner or get cocktails, AMA is the place, especially, you know, being in the St. Louis community. It’s a testament to what I said about
St. Louis at the very beginning of this is that, you know, we were local, we love local and we love being a local community. So that’s what, you know, AMA is aiming to do.
Sean Jordan (50:55)
Fantastic. Well, I will just support that plug by saying everything she said is true. ⁓ Hey, how often can you get a marketer who you can say 100 % of what they said was completely true? No bragging, no boasting. It’s all there. ⁓ Well, thank you so much for being on the Marketing Gateway. It’s been a pleasure. ⁓ thank you again for all the things you’re doing for the students in the classroom to get them ready for.
Hannah Frisch (51:06)
Exactly.
Definitely.
Sean Jordan (51:21)
the next generation of our field and also all the things you’re doing to encourage our local marketers.
Hannah Frisch (51:26)
Yeah, definitely. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me on here. I’ve seen all the episodes and so when you said I want you on, was like, yes, I want to be on this so bad. So thank you for having me today. I truly appreciate it.
Sean Jordan (51:37)
Wow, I love doing interviews like these because I learn so much and they’re always just such a pleasure because ⁓ it’s kind of like a therapy session in a way because we’re talking about things that we all agree on, but it’s also just so amazing and insightful. And I always walk away with so many ideas. So thank you, Hannah, for being on the Marketing Gateway. We really appreciate you. I’d love to have you back again. And I want to just encourage you, if you are ⁓ looking to learn more about marketing,
Please continue to check out all of the episodes we have. And also feel free to contact us any time and let us know what you’d like to hear in future episodes. You can find us on themarketinggateway.com. You can find us on LinkedIn. You can find us wherever you are listening through this podcast. But in the meantime, I’m Sean in St. Louis. This has been the Marketing Gateway. See you next time.
Leave a Reply