Tombras School Future Educator Fellow Gains Invaluable Knowledge from Tombras Agency
This is the second year the Tombras School of Advertising and Public Relations has partnered with the Tombras Agency to organize an Advertising and Public Relations Fellowship for Future Educators. This opportunity allows a doctoral candidate from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to have the chance to shadow Tombras Agency employees and gain insights into their roles during the two-week summer program.
“We are grateful to the Tombras Agency for providing our PhD students with experiences that enrich their teaching and research,” said Associate Professor María De Moya.
Jie Chen, a third-year doctoral candidate in the College of Communication and Information, with a concentration in advertising, completed the fellowship this summer. She obtained her master’s degree in advertising from the Tombras School and then worked in the industry for a year as a media planner at iHeart Media.
Chen returned to UT to pursue her PhD after discovering her passion for research and academics.
“As a media planner, I would help the clients develop three months to a year of media plans. I thought, ‘Wow. I can use my knowledge of social media campaign strategies to execute effective campaigns in the real world.’ I was then motivated to conduct research to explore how different types of advertisements affect consumer behavior. So, I came back to UT to focus my research on how advertising significantly influences consumer behavior,” she said.
Chen’s current research focuses mainly on artificial intelligence (AI) in advertising and AI advertising disclosure. She was investigating the impact of disclosure policies on AI-generated advertisements. Given the novelty of AI, there are currently no policies that require companies to disclose they are using such technologies. Additionally, she was specifically looking into advanced AI tools like Sora, which can convert text into video. Chen explained many advertising companies are using AI tools to create advertising content. She aims to investigate public conversation surrounding AI tools and assess the implications for advertising.
“I was interested in understanding how people perceive AI use in advertising. However, there is a very huge gap between academics and practical application. For academics, the focus tends to be on the conceptual modeling of AI in ads, but that is different than the real world. The industry emphasizes the actual performance and effectiveness of AI in advertising campaigns,” she explained.
Chen was assigned to Tombras’ technology team based on her research. While shadowing the agency’s technology team, she gained insights into how the agency has been innovating with AI to upgrade clients’ websites and customize certain features to fit its customers’ needs. Chen also had the chance to meet with the chief technology officer of Tombras and with analytics team members. She learned about the newly launched Tombras AI ad campaigns, including one for a portable storage company that utilizes AI to automatically generate tailored ads based on location, weather, traffic data, and time.
“I was introduced to how AI is used in optimizing ad performers, including forecasting and analyzing ad outcomes using the AI model. I thought that was pretty cool,” she shared.
Before her internship, Chen’s interest in AI in advertising was mainly conceptual, but her time at the agency had a significant impact on her research. She is now focusing on the practical application of AI in advertising and its sophistication in real-world scenarios. The Advertising and Public Relations Fellowship for Future Educators at Tombras provided Chen with a unique opportunity to deeply engage with AI applications in real-world advertising.
“I appreciated that Tombras School Director Beth Foster selected me as the candidate,” she said. “I’m used to working at a media company but Tombras is a full-service ad company that covers all aspects of advertising. I was excited to learn, gain real-world experience, and get a big picture of how the ad industry works from the beginning to the end.”
Tombras School Future Educator Fellow Gains Invaluable Knowledge from Tombras Agency written by Kristen Gallant and originally published on the College of Communication & Information site.