Office Hours With Milt Hwang, UW-Madison

Milt Hwang is a Lecturer for the Wisconsin School of Business in the Marketing Department. Following a successful 30-year corporate leadership career, Milt brings his inside knowledge of the digital marketing landscape to both undergraduates and graduate students at UW-Madison. And as a working marketer serving as the Principal of a strategic consultancy, he brings the same hands-on implementation of digital strategy to the classroom that he provides his clients. 

Milt’s Marketing in a Digital Age course draws students at all levels, from undergraduates to MBA students. The popular elective also attracts learners looking for digital insights across majors, including journalism, communications, and consumer behavior. While the course aims to give students an overview of social media, SEO, and search marketing, as AI begins to reshape the marketing world, Milt finds that discussing traditional marketing concepts is more important than ever. 

“There’s never been a time in which understanding the fundamentals of marketing has been more helpful in forming a bridge to learning,” Hwang tells Novela. “If you don’t understand the basics, it’s impossible to explain why AI has been so disruptive. AI is disrupting the underlying basics of marketing.” 

However, illustrating the basics while preparing students for an AI-powered future is often challenging in a one-semester elective where students have varying levels of marketing education, and some of have had direct hands-on experience through internships In addition, they may perceive that digital marketing is 100% about social media, rather than the entire marketing mix.

In order to bridge the knowledge gap between traditional marketing concepts and AI disruption, Milt chose Novela’s Search Marketing (Google Ads) Simulation. Based on real data from a leading fashion retailer, Novela’s Search Marketing Simulation provides two different paid search challenges. In the first, students must design campaigns for a legacy product, trench coats. In the second, they must build interest in a second product, leather belts. Guided by Novela’s AI co-pilot, Ela, students learn the core principles of search marketing and customer insights in the first simulation. In the second, students face increased competition and advanced customer segmentation to test the foundational knowledge they mastered in the previous challenge. 

The simulation was a good fit for Hwang, who strives to teach beyond the theory of marketing, encouraging his students to engage with the myriad possibilities of incorporating AI into cross-functional marketing strategy. 

We sat down with Milt to speak about the complexities of helping students find solid footing in a rapidly changing industry.  

How does Novela help you teach learners from different backgrounds the foundations of digital marketing?

“The opening of my class is overall content marketing, digital disruption, and then we approach each of the major channels–websites, email, then search, then paid search,” Hwang says. The paid search simulation bookends two or three concept lectures about the world of search.” 

To provide background for students, Hwang begins with multiple lectures about SEO, moving into paid search. The challenge, according to Hwang, is incorporating AI-based search and LLM-based chatbot search into those lessons. 

Using Novela’s Search Marketing (Google Ads) Simulation, students get first-hand experience with both AI as an assistant and with chatbots. Ela acts as a guide throughout the simulation, providing insights into research and campaign suggestions without simply giving students the correct answers. Students must rely on their own marketing knowledge to meet objectives, stressing the importance of human-in-the-loop judgement while introducing students to the types of AI tools they will encounter in marketing careers. 

You use both the Google Ads trench coat and the leather belt simulations. How do the two work together to help clarify difficult topics?

Hwang says that even as students grasp the marketing principles central to his lectures, it can be difficult to put that knowledge to use. Creating a test-and-learn environment with the first simulation and then a more advanced application in the second helps students understand both practice and theory. 

“Once we've covered overall search trends, which now includes AI search and how it's disrupted the whole world, students are grounded in SEO,” Hwang says. “That’s when I have them do the trench coats sim. They have about four or five days to experiment in a low-risk environment. They have an opportunity at that point to apply all of those learnings into a full-blown assignment with the leather belt scenario”

What grading structure do you use for Novela's simulation-based assignments? 

Of course, college courses are about more than experimentation. Most students are trying to maintain GPAs while attempting to master new skills in a wide range of classes. Teaching an elective can be difficult as many students struggle to balance effort evenly in multiple courses. Hwang appreciates the fact that Novela’s simulations offer multiple plays. Students can practice mastering the simulations at their own pace. 

“Some students really use the first simulation as a learning opportunity because then they know there's going to be a follow-up assignment in which it's going to be more intensive,” Hwang says. “Then the Leather Belt Challenge becomes a full-on, graded assignment.”

By scaffolding the assignments, Professor Hwang is able to foster learning that goes beyond simply seeking a “good” grade. 

“Based on my own simulation play, it’s harder to actually get the conversion results in the Leather Belt Challenge. By layering them, they’ve got a freebie, if you will. I tell them, you’ll do better in the second simulation if you’ve taken it seriously in the first. If they can achieve two out of three objectives, there’s a floor grade that equates to a C+ or a B-. So they’re not going to fail the assignment. At the same time, because the Leather Belt Challenge is harder, it is also rewarding the folks who have fully applied the concepts.

What feedback have you received from students about the Novela simulations?

For most professors, the best feedback comes from students who continue using the knowledge they gained long after the course is over. For Hwang, seeing his students go on to succeed in other classes and in the business world is one of education’s biggest rewards.

“I’ve had students tell me that in the class they were kind of skeptical about AI’s disruptive impact, asking ‘Is he overdoing it?’ Because it didn’t seem like a digital marketing course, it seemed like an AI course,” Hwang says. “But many of them have come back and told me that my class was a full demonstration of AI as a major disruption in the marketing space. Hearing that has been very rewarding.” 

Ready to help your students transform marketing theory into practice? Schedule your demo today!