“Five Questions With…” is a series of profiles of recent CJC graduates and the career paths they chose.

Christopher Law, M.A.M.C. 2013/Web Design Specialization

1. Tell us about your current job.

I am the Vice President/Digital Product Manager for Peoples Bank, a regional bank chain in Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Maryland, Virginia, and DC. I am the digital product advocate for our clients. I pitched a role outside of my previous marketing role that would work closer with Operations to curate a better online experience for our clients, and work to make 15 vendor tools look and feel like one comprehensive online experience. Basically, if you interact with a bank on a screen, it passes through my desk in some capacity, from ATMs to paying your mortgage.

2. Why did you choose to come to the UF College of Journalism and Communications?

I grew up in Gainesville but never expected to go to UF. The College’s Web Design Online Master’s specialization changed my mind. It was tailored to a growing market and a young professional. The program offered and delivered on a large amount of real world experience, both in the class, and through resources to take graduate internships. I knew I wanted to work in marketing, but, in 2010, there were too many people wanting to do that. I needed a way to separate myself. UF provided both the name brand recognition and the online program, which offered me a niche market to enter. I wanted to be able to bridge the gap between the older generation of print marketers who were in leadership positions, the IT departments who notoriously had difficulties communicating with print marketers, and an upcoming digitally literate client base. Having the coding knowledge to work with IT, combined with the user experience and analytics training, allowed me to present how successful online acquisition could be.

3. How did your time at CJC help prepare you for this current position?

My current position is as a digital client advocate. I work as a fixed point between Operations, Marketing, and front line sales. When I started at Peoples in 2018 as the VP for Digital Marketing, we did not have a mobile friendly website. The Web Design Online Master’s degree I received nearly ten years prior was almost designed specifically for this use case. In the last three years, I took that mobile unfriendly website that could not handle online leads through two redesigns, we now receive more leads or account openings than any branch in our footprint, and my three-year plan is to outpace all the branches combined. The master’s program gave me the skills to track analytics, make changes to design, and run client interviews to develop best practices for our region. The previous website, a stopgap measure, was live for two years. In the six months since launching our “best practices” website, we’ve seen 180% more leads than we did in the two years prior.

4. Was there a defining moment, personally or professionally, at CJC that set you on your current path?

Through the focus on WCAG [Web Content Accessibility Guidelines] and responsive design, it wasn’t teaching us how to sell products online, but reaching the client how they wanted to be reached. A professor told me that one project I worked on was technically great, but infuriating to a client, and I took that to heart. Just because you CAN try to upsell a client with fifteen popups and “are you sure you don’t also wants,” doesn’t mean you should, and being an advocate for the client is more important in today’s market than trying to wring a client dry. The reason I got the job today wasn’t because I can maximize sales leads to reps, and collect client data for cold calling, but because the master’s program taught me that a warm transfer, and an interested client, gets you a better sales lead and better customer, long term. When I pitched the new Digital Products role, it was to make a more digestible client experience, simplify the platforms and products we offer, and work with them on a better experience.

5. If you had to do your academic experience or career over again, what, if anything would you do differently?

I would have pursued my master’s right out of college. CJC and the master’s program opened doors I did not have opened previously. I was working as an inside sales rep for a natural gas company, telling 100 clients a day that “I had gas.” I worked for UF as a graduate intern, which lead to a role at Marietta College as the Director of Web Services for the Communications Office. In every role I’ve been in, I’ve revamped the digital experience, from website redesigns to a healthcare payment portal, to a complete overhaul of online and mobile banking. Before my degree, I had the skillset to write a decent social media post, and talk convincingly about natural gas sales figures, but the Web Development program at CJC allowed me to skip a few steps, taking me from aspiring to be a social media coordinator to overseeing the work of three of them.

Bonus question:

What advice do you have for students interested in pursuing a career similar to yours?

Find a niche market. Anyone can be a journalist. Anyone can be a marketer. The skills required for our roles are not limited to our educational path. In the media market we have today, you can be rewarded for writing about or selling to a hobby or interest you’ve had for years. Before this era where journalism, marketing, and web design have merged into a hybrid field, I loved to code small programs. I took that love, found a way to be the bridge between two different departments (marketing and IT), and worked on taking the difficult aspects of each and making it understandable to the other side. Odds are good your small hobby or interest has a following that would love analysis or new products in that field, and any niche hobby is always looking for someone who can make it understandable to the masses, to increase interest. If you can find a way to bridge that gap, you’ll walk into any interview with a better pitch than “well, I’d love to be paid, and this looks like a job that pays.” This has been true for sports journalism for years, but as new interests gain exposure online, we’re seeing opportunities for all sorts of specialists.

Posted: December 17, 2021
Category: Alumni Profiles, Careers, College News, Five Questions With...
Tagged as: Christopher Law