Career Investigation - Jenna Beahn

One of the classes that I took during the Sophomore Business Cohort that really sparked an interest in my career investigation was my marketing class with Professor Spotts, and the Community Business Partners meeting with Sally Azar, the marketing manager for MassLive. Before this class, and the meeting with Mrs. Azar, I always thought marketing was simply advertising; boring stuff! However, after learning about marketing and all of the different aspects of it, and being able to connect the concepts to real life businesses and situations, I became very interested. I can't wait to take another marketing class next semester!

During Professor Spotts' class, we learned about tens of different aspects of marketing, the four P's (product, price, promotion, place), B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to consumer) aspects, supply chains and so much more. Although learning about these different concepts in class was interesting to me, I didn't become engulfed in the idea of marketing until I was able to connect it to situations outside of the classroom., which Sally Azar did a great job of doing!

Mrs. Azar was able to connect multiple concepts that we learned in class to some of MassLive's daily tasks. For example, she talked about MassLive's B2C (business to consumer) selling process, and some of their different ways of marketing. She seemed to really enjoy her job, and loved to pass on some her marketing knowledge down to us.

Connections to the Classroom

During our first meeting, we learned about the differences between work life balance in the United States and work life balance in Canada. We learned how it was used in the real world, through MassLive and their competitors. We also learned about how business ethics can be misused in the workplace, whether purposely or accidentally, and how MassLive is affected by their own ethical decisions, as well as competitors ethical decisions. During our second meeting, we learned about how Mass Live uses statistics to plan their marketing strategies; who visits their website, what they are interested in, inside and outside of their website, what other websites they visit, etc. We also got a fascinating demonstration on Google Analytics, and how it informs Mass Live and their reporters of how their ads are doing and if a change might need to happen. Our third meeting focused on how ethics drives a reporters decision process on whether to run a story or not, thinking about it can affect their business and their readers, or to post anything on their website or social media sites, for the same ethical reasons. We also saw them follow and publish a breaking story; following the story on other news sites, keeping in touch with their reporters and managers and much more. It was very overwhelming! In our fourth and final visit to MassLive, we talked about MassLive and their marketing strategies.We learned who MassLive aims to target in the market, and why, and how their different marketing strategies affect their readers. Overall, MassLive was a great comapny to work with as a Community Business Partner.

Community Business Partner Moments

One of the many benefits of the Sophomore Business Cohort was the ability to partner up with a local business and become community business partners. The business that we got paired up with is MassLive, located in Springfield, MA. Our first meeting with an member from MassLive was with the Human Resources Manager, Natalia Collins. As the HR Manager, Natalia's job is to make sure her workers have a good work-life balance and to make sure her workers have great working conditions. Some examples of what Ms. Collins does are coordinate fun outings such as trips to the Big E or Six Flags or host office parties and Nerf gun wars. Ms. Collins was very informative, giving us information regarding what kind of benefits workers at MassLive receive, what she is looking for in potential future employees, and the working conditions and policies that MassLive has. Ms. Collins was very informative and happily answered all of our questions. My personal favorite question that we asked is what distinguishes MassLive from its competitors, both in a public and employee perspective. The main points to her answer to this question was that MassLive has a great work life balance, a competitive salary, its pretty easy to fill lost positions and they don't have many competitors in Springfield. After gladly answering all of our questions thoroughly, Ms. Collins went on to talk more about MassLive. Some of the main points that we got out of this meeting were that their office is Dr. Seuss based (a personal favorite fun fact of mine), they are huge on work-life balance, MassLive is a part of Advance Local (which also owns Vogue, 17 Magazine, Food Network, etc.) and they have been partners with Google for the past three years.

The next member we met up with at MassLive was Mike Burnham, the sales manager. Mr. Burnham talked to us about statistics and how stats relates back to MassLive and their sales. Our major question for Mr. Burnham was how he uses statistics in his daily life. He started out by saying that he likes to know where clients learned about them, so they know where their money is going. The way MassLive does this is the usage of cookie data, which is when websites use "cookies" to leave a code on your computer and reports back what websites you go to/what you search, which in turn creates data. MassLive has about 2.6 billion cookies.  They also use third party cookies, which is when they buy data from another business and matches cookie ID's with new cookies, which in turn helps them know who to reach out to. MassLive also uses ad networks, which are ads that follow you around (you go to a website, it tags you, follows you, and send reminder messages/ads). All of these difference techniques and operations allow MassLive to know anything and everything they want to know. For example, MassLive has data on who's visiting their pages, how old they are, their gender, their other interests, etc. They allow MassLive to "eliminate waste", or target people willing to convert, make informed decisions, see the who/what/when/where/why's of people on their website, etc.


The third time we visited MassLive, we met up with Noah Bombard, the managing producer and John Beattie, the director of digital operations. Mr. Bombard and Mr. Beattie took us to a small room with a large TV where they were following breaking news stories and updating their website and social media sites. Mr. Bombard was the first to talk to us about ethics and social media. He began with the fact that the internet and computers have have made finding, investigating and posting news stories so much easier. 2005-2006 was the big move from paper news to online news, and that means it went from consumers being able to see stories hours after they happened, to being able to see them minutes after they happened. He then went on to talk about how the internet has affected them as a news business. For example, they have to make decisions much quicker now and they can follow social media sites like twitter/Facebook/etc. and download videos or get the stories first hand before any other news reporter. It is imperative that MassLive get the story before nay other news reporter because it increases their credibility and they want their website to be the first place a client sees a story. After listening to them talk, and watching them keep up with a breaking story, I asked if their job was overwhelming, and they said extremely! I was overwhelmed for them!

For our fourth and final visit, we met with Sally Azar, the marketing manager for MassLive. This visit was probably the easiest to relate back to our marketing class with Professor Spotts. A few of the main points that we talked about with Mrs. Azar include market penetration, B2B and B2C perspectives, millennials, and targeting, all of which are major concepts that we learned about in our marketing class. According to Mrs. Azar, MassLive has about 80% market penetration in Western Mass, and are working towards getting more market penetration in the Worcester area. MassLive targets millennials because 74% get their information from online sources, and 88% get their information from Facebook. Also, millennials like the idea of features that make using websites easier; and MassLive has the top ten features that people look for, including the search bar and the ability to share information. She also talked a lot about B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to consumer) sales and how those affect the overall marketing for MassLive. Mrs. Azar spent time showing us MassLive's website, and their specific marketing techniques, and gave us an idea of what they plan to do in the future. 

Goodbye, MassLive and members! Thanks for everything!