The Comet Marketing team started last school year with an initial goal of promoting Honors College programming. Photo courtesy of Comet Marketing.
A group of
students came together to launch an organization dedicated to helping other
student groups on campus better market themselves to the UTD community.
Comet Marketing
provides services such as making posters and flyers, creating promotional
videos and assisting with photography-related needs to campus organizations.
The idea for
Comet Marketing surfaced last year with the aim of promoting the Hobson Wildenthal
Honors College, said physics senior Benjamin Rubanov, founder and president of
the eight-member group.
“When we came back this year, I
contacted the people who were on the team, and I said, ‘Guys, let’s make
something happen out of this, let’s make it real.’ And it just started taking
off,” Rubanov said. “We’ve got weekly meetings, and we’ve got eight people on
the team who are working around the clock.”
Biomedical engineering sophomore and
Comet Marketing Vice President Emma Henderson said the group decided to expand
its services to the entire university instead of just the Honors College.
“There’s obviously things we can
market (for the Honors College), but it’s not the breadth of the entire
university,” Henderson said. “We market for student organizations and that’s
our main focus, but the Honors College has supported us so much and we
appreciate that, so we love to market for them and take photos at events and
things like that.”
Comet Marketing’s most recent project
involved helping UTD Tri Sci Professions with its Cultural Expo Event. The team published flyers along with taking
photos at the event.
“They did a great
job. They definitely took a lot of pressure off of us, so we could focus on the
event itself instead of focusing on other details,” said neuroscience senior
Justin John, president of Tri Sci Professions. “Their help got the word out
there a lot better than if it was just us doing it.”
Each project
that Comet Marketing undertakes involves several meetings between themselves
and their clients. Depending on the scale of the project, the process takes
anywhere from a week to several weeks.
“After discussing it with our team,
we develop a proposal of things that we can do in the due dates that we are
able to abide by,” Rubanov said. “We go back to the client, who then says
‘Okay, that sounds good.’ Then we get to work, work, work, to make sure the
best content goes out. And in the end, we always try to get as much feedback as
possible.”
Although the eight current members of
Comet Marketing share the goal of working to market other organizations, they
all have varying backgrounds and roles in the team. None of the members are
majoring in business-related fields, but Rubanov said anyone pursuing any major
is encouraged to join.
“The team has such a collaborative nature that
most of these roles are loosely defined for now,” Rubanov said. “I think as we
grow, we definitely want to more acutely define these roles, but now, it’s a
little bit free-flow and a little bit defined, and it’s working really well.”
The team receives its budget from the
SOC for software and equipment needed to support its marketing projects, but it
provides services to other campus organizations completely free of charge.
“We are all learning skills that are
all going to make us better in the future, in our professions,” Henderson said.
Rubanov said his vision for the team
is to have a dedicated office, where people can come and ask for help on their
marketing needs.
“I think we’re filling a hole in the
university that hasn’t been filled before, and I’m pretty excited about it,”
Rubanov said. “We’ll grow our website, we’ll grow our social medias, we’ll
create recruitment cycles, we’ll know how to interview people and what
questions to ask. Growth, growth, growth.”