Carrie Wilson-Brown
Get to know some of our College of Media faculty. Carrie Wilson-Brown is a lecturer of media and cinema studies and of advertising.
What’s it like to teach two Media majors?
The Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising has incredibly creative faculty and creative classes, and we tend to dive into the social sciences. Most research by the tenure-track faculty is on effects: how advertising affects populations, why people are persuaded by particular messages, or what pushes us behaviorally. It’s also capitalism and buying, and for me, what’s so intriguing is coming from a creative space to get to the minutiae of what makes people psychologically tick. In the Department of Media & Cinema Studies, there's a community of creative people who love film and television; they love to talk about film, television, and storytelling, and also the industry. I’m able to mold them together, but I get something so vastly different from the students and faculty as well.
You double-majored in journalism and communication, yet lecture on different topics. What were your reasons?
It doesn’t seem like it would have relevance with advertising, but some of the relevance is that we read advertising texts like any story, if you think about it. When I ask students, “Why advertising classes,” all can point to an advertisement that tugged at their heartstrings or made them cry or joyous. People who love certain ads see them as a way to tell stories, not only as a way to sell products to audiences. Advertisements are created for more than that, building culture with each one that is produced. On the other hand, I’m mostly doing video production classes, and 15 years later, with social media, this is what people do, and it’s such a beautiful process to see. [Students] are storytellers out of the womb, always with a camera in your hand. I love visual culture; I love helping students create visual culture.
What courses are you teaching currently?
I teach three courses this semester, two in advertising and one in media and cinema studies. I teach ADV 301: Becoming an Influencer; ADV 393: Advertising and Society; and MACS 203: Contemporary Movies. I’ve only taught it twice, but MACS 203 is fun to teach because I take "contemporary" very seriously—something I’ve watched in the past three to four years. There are a lot of films that slipped under the radar during COVID-19, so it’s great to pick newer films. We watch the movie, and then we try to apply concepts in small prompts. It’s one of those spaces of joy for students in their day where I’m like, “Let’s go watch movies.”
What has been your best memory from teaching here?
Last semester, I taught ADV 393: Advertising in Society for the first time, and I don’t have a traditional advertising background. I think when I talk about advertising, it’s from a bit of a different perspective, and there were a couple of moments where a group of four or five students wanted to clap after my lecture because it was such a crescendo. Sometimes, as professors, we get hung up on dictating knowledge, but when someone says they want to clap, they feel engaged with what I was saying and want to listen to me.
What’s one piece of advice you would give to students?
There’s no one way to be successful at college. It’s easy to be trapped because you have friends, roommates, or siblings you see are successful—whatever that looks like to you. Maybe they’re paving their way through higher education in a very particular manner, whether that’s joining groups, being in fraternities or sororities, or staying up until three in the morning. But, if you look around, you are in a community of around 43,000 people, and everybody seems to do their successes differently. Don’t figure out the formula to success because that might not be your formula. Find the way that’s best for you.
—Interview by Chloe Barbarise, New Voices Intern
