The Marketing Department is delighted to announce a new Master of Science in Digital Marketing (MSDM). This one-year residential program will offer a comprehensive, rigorous, graduate-level education to students with both non-business and business backgrounds to enter into the burgeoning field of Digital Marketing. In the coming months, we plan to announce and market this program to ensure a talented and diverse cohort of students joining us in fall 2023.

I want to recognize some of the many people who were instrumental in getting us to this point. Thanks to Dean Martijn Cremers and Ken Kelley for their enthusiastic support and sponsorship of the cutting-edge program proposal we developed. Both Joe Cherian and Kristen Collett-Schmitt helped navigate the proposal through numerous committees. And finally, special thanks to members of the Marketing Department for their valuable advice and helpful input.

The MSDM program will train students to lead in a field of business where the demand for digital marketing professionals is increasing rapidly. More firms now expect employees to be familiar with the extraction, processing, analysis and protection of data from various digital sources to assist them with digital marketing, social media engagement, data privacy and multi-channel resource allocation.

The MSDM is an analytically-oriented graduate program focusing on broader strategic issues of digital transformation as well as digital and social media marketing and strategy, online marketing decision models, digital branding, pricing, distribution, advertising, promotion decisions, customer management, machine learning and artificial intelligence applications in the digital domain. In addition, by addressing issues such as privacy and ethics, mitigating algorithmic biases, and curtailing the spread of misinformation, we will produce graduates whose actions will bear fruit for society’s common good. A vital element in this program will be an experiential learning opportunity through a new course, Applied Digital Marketing, where students will spearhead the design, deployment and optimization phases of live digital marketing campaigns.

The MSDM will also deliver on the college-level Objectives and Key Results for the Academy (OKRA) of engendering a diverse, equitable and inclusive culture. The program will continue the marketing department’s already strong track record of gender diversity, as over 65% of students across all marketing programs are female. In addition, a key priority will be creating cohorts of MSDM students with a rich diversity of backgrounds and perspectives where all students, including marginalized and underrepresented populations, are integral and meaningful members.

In many ways, the new MSDM is a natural extension of the digital marketing offerings the department has introduced in recent years. The department currently offers a Digital Marketing track for the UG Marketing majors, a Digital Marketing minor program for non-Mendoza undergraduates, and a STEM-designated Digital Marketing and Marketing Analytics major within the MBA program.

We are creating a website for this program and look forward to providing details as soon as it is ready.

Shankar Ganesan
John Cardinal O’Hara, C.S.C. Chairperson & Professor
Department of Marketing