Office Hours With University of Colorado Boulder Professor John Ploumitsakos

John Ploumitsakos is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Marketing at Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder, whose 20 years of marketing experience, including senior leadership positions at Google and Twitter, give him unique insights into the modern marketing landscape. 

In his senior-level Advertising and Promotion Management course, for example, Ploumitsakos breaks the semester into three segments: planning a budget, creative strategy, and brand strategy. And while the course isn’t necessarily a digital marketing course, students need hands-on experience seeing strategy in action. 

That’s where Novela comes in. Ploumitsakos uses both Novela’s Social Media Advertising (Meta Ads and Organic Social) and our B2B AI Marketing Simulations to give students firsthand experience taking marketing campaigns from planning to execution. 

In this week’s edition of Office Hours, we caught up to Professor Ploumitsakos to ask how Novela integrates into his marketing curriculum. 

How are you using Novela’s simulations in the classroom?

While the course uses a textbook to teach advertising theory and best practices, it doesn’t delve deeply into digital channels, since the course isn’t specifically a digital marketing class. However, digital strategy is inextricable from advertising strategy, especially in the AI age. Senior students taking the class are often familiar with digital channels but often have little experience building campaigns within a digital ecosystem, according to Ploumitsakos

“Students have enough background in that from previous courses to what the channels, " Ploumitsakos says, “When SEM, SEO, content marketing, and social, come up in our third unit, I use simulations tactically. When we are learning about SEM, for example, we'll do the SEM simulation.”

How do simulations help students prepare for marketing jobs?

Marketing is all about balance, using cross-channel promotion to move audiences down funnel. It can be difficult to teach that balance through lectures and coursework alone. Ploumitsakos says it’s vital for students to see marketing efforts in action to understand the tradeoffs inherent in budgeting, planning, and execution. 

“For high level strategy, like B2B marketing, simulations are a way of making planning and budgeting real in a way that all students can understand. Yes, you have to allocate a budget across different goals and different channels. But until doing that it’s impossible to know what the tradeoffs are. Marketing isn’t always a neat puzzle that you're putting together. You have to, sacrifice one thing sometimes to improve another,” Ploumitsakos says. 

Making those sacrifices and seeing their effect on ROI in real-time enables students to test and learn their own expertise, leading to greater confidence outside the classroom. 

How are your students using simulations to learn AI best practices?

AI is a tricky subject on college campuses. Students are often banned outright for using tools like ChatGPT in their other courses. But as marketers, students will use AI every day for everything from campaign insights to content generation. 

Novela’s one-of-a-kind AI co-pilot, Ela, is different from simply “asking AI” for answers. Designed by marketers to help guide marketing students, Ela helps inform decisions without making them, giving students a learn-as-you-go lesson in the importance of human judgment to the marketing process.  

At first, we ran into  problems where they were taking the AI  advice very literally, and then getting somewhat frustrated if it didn't produce the outcome that they were expecting.” Ploumitsakos says. This provided him the opportunity to teach AI best practices. 

“They would sort of come to me and say, I did exactly what it told me to. But then they began to view AI differently using Claude or ChatGBT for a project. They got into the right mindset. AI is a tool built into the simulation. It’s not a rulebook for the simulation.”

How is Novela different from other simulations?

For Ploumitsakos, other simulations have seemed more like an extension of the textbook: theory based, rather than a dynamic encounter closely resembling the actual tools they will use as marketers. For students with limited access to ad platforms, like Google or Meta Ads, other simulations seemed more studying for a text than executing an ad campaign.

“You can understand what cost per click is, but unless you're managing it, like in a simulated campaign, you're not really gonna understand how it works. That’s a huge benefit of Novela because it's very specific. Other simulations were broad and didn’t have AI built in. The background information was all text-based, so it was impossible to get a sense of what the industry really looks like.”

What are students saying about Novela’s simulations?

Though the class isn’t specifically a digital marketing class, at the end of the semester, students appreciated the time spent putting their advertising and promotion knowledge to work as they prepared for internships and interviews. 

“Students found it very, very useful, " Ploumitsakos says. “They put skills into practice. They were also happy to have a realistic experience in how they should be thinking about AI to sort of curate lots of information and pull away the insights.”

Ready to give your students a chance to put their B2B and social media advertising skills to the test? Schedule a demo today!