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Shiro Hatori
Welcome to the higher ed demand gen podcast helping higher education marketing leaders share knowledge about learning strategies and tactics that are relevant today. See what you can learn today by listening to one of our episodes.
Hello, everyone, welcome to the higher ed demand gen podcast hosted by concept 3d. If you like our content, please follow and subscribe to us on Spotify, Apple, Google or wherever you’re listening to our podcast. And if you’re on Apple, please drop us a comment. We’d love to know what you think about it. My name is Shiro. And today we will be talking about fostering a physical experience that fosters a connection to the school’s brand. And for this topic, I’m very excited to have Chris Alexander join us today. He’s the senior director of digital communications and brand experience at NYU School of Global Public Health. Welcome to the podcast, Chris.
Chris Alexander
Great to be here. Thanks for the opportunity.
Shiro Hatori
And as everyone knows, I do love to ask this icebreaker Chris, what do you love about higher ed?
Chris Alexander
I would say higher ed, for me, in my experience has been an amazing privilege to be a part of. And it’s something that has propelled my career and my personal growth and really challenged me and it’s something that I wish was an option for more people. And it’s not. And I think we should, you know, we should, we should face that and think about it. But for me, it’s been an amazing privilege to go to grad school and learn all these things. So I think higher ed is an amazing kind of springboard for career.
Shiro Hatori
Thanks for sharing that. So let’s get into the topic a little bit more. Can you tell us a little bit more about your role with NYU School of Public global health and how you got there, I think it’s an interesting journey about you know, how you got involved with what we’ll be talking about today.
Chris Alexander
So I’m a California transplant to New York City. And I went to school at UC Santa Cruz, where I studied studio art, and metal sculpture. And I knew while a lot of my friends were going into the art gallery space, that wasn’t really the place for me, I was more interested in combining creativity and art and design with business. And that led me to NYU for grad school. So I came to NYU, I did a master’s in Graphic Communications. And part of my strategy coming to grad school was I was interested in NYU has a amazing tuition remission policy for eligible staff, they’ll pay for up to two master’s degrees and a PhD, which is kind of amazing. And so I came to NYU, went to grad school, and I started working here in an admissions office. And I worked for four years in admissions and recruitment, doing everything from updating websites, to designing postcards to putting on info sessions to talking to random people off the street, who came in and we’re like, what kind of programs do you got? And how much do they cost and those formative years working in admissions and recruitment? I carry with me today because they really taught me a how to sell higher education. But also what are the barriers and the things that people think about when they’re thinking about is this for me, can I do it? So I worked for years in admissions and recruitment. I went on to another department in NYU, to do more event planning and media production, and this a lot more technical kind of video stuff. And then that brought me to the role I have now, where I’ve been working in communications and brand brand management. And when I got this job, I remember looking at this job, and the job description was pretty generic. It wasn’t super exciting. And sometimes that’s how it is in higher ed. And I remember walking into this small, kind of plain room a little stuffy. And I sat down and the interviewer said, we’re creating a new school from the ground up. And we’re getting a new building. And we are building this brand from scratch. And they had no video capabilities. They had very little social media capabilities. Their website was not mobile responsive, if you can actually imagine. They had a brochure, they had some logo files and like a PDF of approved colors. And that’s about it. And, you know, I walked out of the interview thinking, how often does NYU create a new school? Maybe every 1020 years, right? And I kind of left just thinking like, what an amazing opportunity to get to build something pretty much from the ground up. And so when I took this job, the first tasks that I had was a complete rebrand of the website. We built a small podcast team and video team and we kind of redefined their newsletter strategy for email and their social media strategy. And it was really an awesome opportunity to jump in and build something from the ground up and a lot of that kind of communications and brand experience that we did and all of these other elements fed into the new building which I’m You know, totally happy to talk about more now.
Shiro Hatori
Yeah, love that. And I know, you know, you came in from a digital perspective, at least from experience background, but you have that, you know, education more in the studio and art space. And so can you tell us a little bit more about how you and your team are creating a physical experience right now just digital experience that fosters a connection to the school’s brand at the School of Public global health? Yeah,
Chris Alexander
and I’ll say I was super fortunate to get involved early on. In the final stages of construction for this building, the fear for my department was, we’d move in, and it would just be a white wall office that would be kind of playing. And our only option at that point was like to put art on the wall. And luckily, we were brought to the table fairly early on to really think about, what does what is this school about? What is the brand about? And how can it be expressed in this physical space. So the way that process started was, we had a lot of brainstorming conversations, we spoke to a lot of different stakeholders, alumni, faculty, students really sort of being like what’s at the core of why these people are coming here to do this work. And we started with this core concept, that public health is usually public health work sometimes is invisible, right. So if your water is clean, you don’t think about public health. If your if your air is clean, if you have nutritious food, you have relative safety, where you live and where you work, and where you worship. Public health is not something on your mind. Until as we all learned in 2020, when your air is dangerous, and when there’s, you know, when there aren’t when there’s a pandemic, or when you’re you don’t have access to nutritious foods, then people are clean water, as is happening now in the United States, and places still don’t have clean water, then people become aware of oh my gosh, public health health is a thing. And so we started with that kind of core concept that public health professionals are working 24/7 behind the scenes to try to make sure that that doesn’t happen to you. And they’re still working now. And so we started with that as a core concept. And then we distilled that down a little bit more to this idea of the elements that support life, right earth, air, fire, and water. And within our building, I’m going to kind of narrate and walk you through a couple cool spots in our building where we expressed these, these brand elements. So when you walk into our lobby, we have a 14 foot LED video wall with photos and videos of students and faculty alumni doing Study Abroad around the world. Images from key moments like graduation. And the purpose here is that we wanted to showcase the students, the faculty and the staff. Because without the people this is an empty building with a flag that has no meaning it’s about the people in the building and the work that they’re doing. And so we have this dynamic video wall that’s just bright, and it has a lot of movement. And you know, selfishly on the marketing and communication side, what an amazing privilege to have eyeballs on Broadway looking at our stuff, right? It’s just it’s kind of a dream. And so that’s what you see from the street. When you walk into our lobby. If you step further into the lobby. On one side, we have an artistic rendering of those elements of life. So this is a laser cut artistic rendering out of colored acrylic material. And it sort of sits above the seating area like a lounge seating area where students can meet up before class, they can meet up with their friends. They can cram for tests, or they can kind of decompress after a class before they step out into Broadway. And then opposite that seating area with the elements of life, we have a 30 foot long living plant wall. And this has a variety of plants that bloom at different times of the year. So it’s a constantly evolving, almost sculptural element in the space, which is super cool. There are ferns, Patos, spider plants and other tropical plants that I’m not going to try to name because I’m going to butcher the names. But it’s this amazing thing where you step into the space and it’s cleaning the air naturally increases oxygen levels. There’s a hybrid irrigation system behind the wall that recycles the water. And when you’re in the space, there’s a moisture in the air kind of like a jungle. And it’s really cool. And the objective here with the lobby was when you step in to the lobby your your first introduction to the building, right? We wanted to introduce our visitors to the elements of life and that concept, encouraged them to reconnect with nature to relax and sit and refresh and look at the green wall and smell it and kind of hear the silence that comes with a huge wall of plants. And we wanted to create this space that’s kind of contemplative, it’s meditative and it’s a buffer From the noisy crazy Street, outside on Broadway. So that’s our, that’s the lobby. And once you enter the lobby, if you’ll come with me on the elevator, up to the fourth floor, we have an art gallery that features the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. So we call them SDGs. And these are goals defined by the United Nations, what they call a blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the earth. So some examples are Zero Hunger, clean water, education for all, building sustainable cities, it’s sort of painting this picture of a future where humans can grow and thrive and something that we would kind of all like to live in. And the objective with this gallery installation was to first reinforce the partnerships that NYU has with these amazing local and global organizations. And to celebrate these goals. And something that I’m going to pick up on several times is remind students of the future that they’re fighting for, in what they are learning and what they’re studying. And if we hop back on the elevator and go up to the eighth floor, we have a long graphic timeline. It’s a vinyl installation on the wall. And it documents the history of public health at NYU, that even though our school has only existed for 15, since 2015, public health has been at NYU for 90 years. So it was this evolution, where in the 30s, in the 1930s, the first courses in health were created. In the 1970s, the Department of Health Studies was created the Master of Public Health degree, which is our flagship degree was created in the 80s, we created the PhD in 2012. And then in 2015, we planted the flag in the ground and the College of Global Public Health was formed, later renamed to school. And then fast forward to 2020. In the middle of a pandemic, we all nervously with masks moved into 708, Broadway our building. So we have this timeline that shows sort of the evolution of this space and how it’s created. And the objective here is to show students and all visitors that this is more than a degree, right? If a student comes here, they’re opting in to become part of a larger legacy of public health that extends way far into the past, and involves people that did work before them. And it involves the work they’re going to do in the future. And so it really wanted to give them this this perspective that like you’re part of a bigger thing here. That’s kind of amazing. And, you know, they should be kind of energized and jazzed about that when it’s time to cram for midterms and things are stressed out. And, and, and things are stressful times. And it reminds them kind of like you know why to keep going. So those are kind of the main elements. There’s two more things we’re working on right now that we’re kind of in, brainstorm mode still. But I think we’re excited about one, we’re going to do a gallery installation of artifacts. So sort of, if you’d imagine like you walk into a museum, they have those pedestals with a little acrylic square, and there’s a little like thing inside with a little label. So we’re working on a gallery installation of artifacts, maybe syringes to represent vaccines, something about clean water versus polluted water, we’re playing with different ideas. One of our faculty who works in environmental health has an irradiated object from Chernobyl, which is pretty gnarly. And he might let us borrow it and put it in the in the, in the artifact installation area, which is pretty cool. So we’re playing with that. It’s, it’s exciting. And then the other thing we’re working on right now is a on the third floor, which is where all of our students hang out a global map that’s going to be along this entire big wall that shows all the different countries of the world. And there’s going to be magnets where people, students, and faculty and staff can put a magnet where they’re from, to really point out that we are truly a global school. I mean, even in the numbers, we’re majority international students. We have alumni working in over over Yeah, we have alumni working in over 40 countries in the world. So we thought this would be kind of a immersive installation where students could walk in and just be confronted with like, wow, you know, the scope of how many different countries people are from is pretty amazing. So there’s a couple other small features throughout the whole building. The carpeting is made from recycled fish nets. Every floor has a different color on the carpeting. So green for Earth red for fire blue for water. We have a gym on premise, we have filtered water fountains. All of the furniture was built with sustainable materials. The majority of our desks for faculty and staff are variable height so we can sit or stand the student space where students hang out all the time they have study rooms, individual and group study rooms, and it’s over 7000 square feet. And it was all designed with a priority access to natural light. And the thesis with all of this is not that, oh, we built this really cool building, it’s that if we create a space that promotes wellness, and inspires, and therefore inspires ideas, if we do that, well, students are going to study better, they’re going to feel better faculty are going to teach better, and staff will enjoy working here.
And so I will say, you know, what we’ve built and are still continuing to build it. 708, Broadway, for GPH is is super cool. But it’s also part of a larger NYU movement movement. So there’s a couple other details that I just want to point out around the NYU campus in general, there’s a actually a cogeneration power plant under one of the dorms that provides heating for 44 buildings and electricity for 26. Buildings. What and what is it on the top? What is the library?
Shiro Hatori
I was gonna say, what is a code generator? I don’t know. I don’t know what that is. It’s a
Chris Alexander
Yeah, so I’m certainly not an expert in power plants. But my limited research is that it’s a type of power plant where when it generates electricity, the residual heat is then used for something else, which is a very, very sustainable kind of elegant design.
Shiro Hatori
Okay, cool. Thank you. Thanks for explaining. Yeah.
Chris Alexander
And so a couple other things that are really cool. On top of our library, there’s 304 solar panels that can power the equivalent of one entire residence hall. And so all of these little things add up to NYU is goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2040. So it’s, it’s, it’s really cool to see that theme carried out in the little things, and then in the big things. And, and I really got to say that my role in all this with the brand and the design was the cherry on top, and there were dozens of people that worked for years. On this, I just want to quickly shout out a few folks who were instrumental in this, climate halls, Ban architects, and Rocco and the team at piscatella Design Center were just wonderful partners who dreamed with us to create all of this and create it and bring it into existence. Cheryl Hilton was the founding Dean of School of Global Public Health, she really fought to establish this as a school and secure this building for us to do this work. Julia Cartwright was previously the dean of communications, she pushed to make sure that communications and marketing had a seat at the table where these these decisions were happening among leadership. So that was super, super important. And then, lastly, and absolutely not least, I really got a shout out Amanda Garoppolo, and coilin Gomez from our operations team. These folks were tenacious and hugely instrumental in getting us here. And they somehow figured out how to move 150 faculty and staff from three buildings into one building in the middle of a pandemic. And nobody had done that before. And there was no blueprint and manual on how to do that. So, you know, I just gotta say, 1000 kudos and lists gratitude to all these people that without their work, this building would not exist in its current form.
Shiro Hatori
Great. And Chris, I have some follow up for that, you know, you’ve spent all this time planning and strategizing what that brand experience what that physical experience of this new school building was going to be like. And there’s just so much that went into it right? You said the different floors, the coloring on the carpet, the experience the moisture, like everything, like did this gets you a lot of press too, as well. I’m just thinking like, I had a conversation with that Bentley, Bentley University and they’re one of the first schools to adopt cryptocurrency for tuition payment. And they also created some NF Ts, because they have some really strong sports teams. And that got him so much, you know, press and it was really good for the school’s brand as a whole to it. I think I’m a national news and I’m just curious, like, you know, all this time you’ve invested in you and your team to develop some this beautiful building, like I’m curious, like, dedicated a lot of good PR.
Chris Alexander
I think you got some PR mostly, mostly in a local kind of space. I think when you have a large university like NYU, and you have something new and shiny, it helps to kind of use that as your as your next showpiece as a demonstration. As I kind of tied it in, you know, NYU has these larger sustainability goals. So once they had something to demonstrate that they were, you know, putting action behind it, that’s where we got a little bit of PR. I want to say, I don’t think we got a lot of PR sort of From a wide perspective, like nationally, but I think locally, people were super excited to come and visit. The students were super excited to have this home base that really, you know, solidified why they picked this and sort of reinforced their selection. So I think we got a little bit of PR, I think there’s potential in the future, when we kind of further develop the building and the brand, and we kind of keep going. But I think it’s an iterative process.
Shiro Hatori
Now, that’s great to hear. And in terms of like, spin, oh, man, curious because you have this admissions enrollment or recruiting background like how is that? How’s it the building in the students been so far? Like? Have you seen changes in enrollment and recruitment? With the new building the new school?
Chris Alexander
Yeah, it’s certainly something that gets people excited to come and visit. Since 2020, well, I’d say before 2020, you know, we really had to really struggle to tell people what public health was, right? People understand why going to school for going to the medical school, a law school and business school and studying history and art. And they know these things, engineering, they know these things. But public health’s was this weird in between the kind of thing. And we really had to really struggle with explaining it. And then suddenly, the silver lining of the disaster that was COVID was that everybody knew what public health was. So from that moment, yes, we saw enrollment, Spike, and a lot more interest. From the PR perspective, our faculty were getting asked all kinds of questions as experts in their field. So that was a huge catapulting moment, that is still is still going, actually, you know, public health interest is still increasing. We have, you know, COVID is not going away, and there will be another disaster that we have to mitigate in the future. And so it’s really about telling people that we need these professionals, they are vital to the future of our communities. So but yeah, enrollment is still going strong.
Shiro Hatori
Yeah, it’s really interesting. And I know earlier, you mentioned there’s a lot of international students enrolled with, with the public global health. Is that like, how does that compare with the rest of NYU and other schools? Or is it as a whole? Like, are there more international students with global health? Or? And I’m curious how you’re using this physical space to actively recruit international students as well.
Chris Alexander
Yeah, NYU is a largely International School. And, you know, there are a dozen global campuses around the world. And we have students and alumni from probably every country in the world as well, for GPH. Specifically, it’s hard to have a really cool physical space when you have international students who can’t come here, right very easily. Or even folks that are not in New York who can’t come here. So that is a challenge. And that’s something that on the digital side of things, we’re still trying to think about how to tell people like, really how amazing it is to step foot in here and experience it. But, but as for NYU as a whole, it’s a pretty international community. I mean, one of the, one of the main attracting points of doing public health work in New York City, in particular is among our five boroughs. There’s virtually representation of every culture, perhaps in the world. And maybe I’m going a little extreme with that, but it’s one of the most diverse cities in the world. And so from a public health perspective, if you wanted to study different populations, and how their their culture relates to their food relates to their transportation relates to their access to health care, you can probably find a new book in New York, of any culture, you want to study and go talk to those people. So, you know, NYU is international GPH is majority International, but just the fact that it’s centered here makes perfect sense in that the city itself is an extremely diverse city.
Shiro Hatori
Gotcha. Thanks for explaining that to me. Yeah. I think I mentioned in Scotts right now the new city in a few days, so and I was here a few months ago for another wedding and it is deaf person. Yeah. Food and different people I would see just walking around the street. It’s very different. Colorado, where I’m from so yeah, I love it. Curious, you know, kind of going back to you telling this whole story about developing this space out, you know, over a period of years. What can other schools start thinking about to do create these kinds of physical experience that help tie the connection to the school and brand. And to the entire school as well, to the university institution, when they start doing really start thinking about the experiences?
Chris Alexander
Yeah, well, first, I think I would, I would encourage people to think that everybody who enters your building your physical space is a potential investor in your school, and they’re investing different things. Right. So prospective students are walking in thinking, okay, am I going to invest my money? But also, am I going to invest? Two, four years of my life? At this place? Can I see myself here walking in here, studying here going to class here? Donors might walk in thinking, you know, do I want to invest in Can I see my name on the lecture hall or something like that? And for members of the public, they’re thinking, do I want to invest an hour of my time coming to your panel event, or watching your webinars? So everybody who steps foot in the door is sort of playing out that kind of that risk assessment and sort of like investment assessment? Like, should I? Should I be part of this? Is it worth it? To me? And one of the things that I think a lot of us maybe don’t think about often is that when a prospective student considers attending school, there are a lot of different data points in that decision, price distance from home, where are the alumni working? You know, and these are all the things that a lot of folks talk about on an podcasts like yours are sort of like these are the parts of the decision. But I think I would encourage people to not forget that there’s a highly emotional component in this decision. And the in the back of their head, they’re asking themselves, can I envision myself here? Can I envision myself going to class here, studying here, walking around campus. And if you go even further, you know, dig a little deeper, will I find friends here? Will I find community so that’s why the physical space is so important. And it’s something that is can be overlooked. A lot of places just have a building, and faculty and students in it, and they have their logo on the front. And that’s, that’s great. But if you can create an environment in which a student walks in, and they feel like they’re a part of something, you’re leveling up the performance of your organization, a whole lot. So there’s, there’s three kind of pieces of advice, I would give folks who are thinking about trying to create or improve the physical space in their in their institution. The first as I kind of talked about earlier, is you got to really discover your core concept. And that and that starts with reading through your marketing materials with fresh eyes, talk to stakeholders, talk to students and alumni, find out their motivations, you know, ask them, of all the things to do on this wonderful Earth, what drew you to spend your time here? Again, it’s an investment, right? They could be doing this, they could be doing something else. I would ask yourself, what are we fighting for? Is this an opportunity to show off what the school and the brand is all about? Is it truth and justice? Is it spreading appreciation for a dying art form? Is it to build stuff, break stuff, innovate? You know, in our case, it’s creating a world where communities can be healthy. So you got to kind of find, what are you all about. And that takes time. And that takes a lot of discussions and it takes you know, the patience to think through the different ideas. And then you got to find your core concepts out of that. The second piece of advice I’d give is once you have some sort of a concept, think about how that can be represented in the physical world. So I mentioned before artifacts, artwork, photography, video. So a couple ideas that we can spit ball for a second, you know, if you work in any of the humanities, history, art, literature, those kinds of fields, think about what are the tools that people use to express their ideas? You know, I’m imagining old typewriters, antique paintbrushes, fountain pens, first edition books, images of cave paintings, like, what are the roots of what you’re doing? Where does it come from? quotes that inspired movements and speeches that started revolutions, kind of, you know, really boil it down to like, what are the core tools that are part of this work, and for the folks who are in the biology is the chemistry is the sciences. These people have it easy. They got the gizmos and gadgets, right? They got the microscopes and the telescopes and the lasers and the 3d printing machines and all that good stuff. And so that you know, think about how the, the, the concept of what you’re what you’re working on can be represented in the physical space. And then you got the athletics and student life and that kind of thing. You can think about old trophies, vintage footballs, you know, a wall of Polaroids of students who came from past years, maybe a time capsule, really trying to create this sense of that they’re stepping into a longer legacy of of have students that came before them. So find your core concept, think about how it can be represented in a physical space. And then the last thing I’d say is, then you got to take a look at the physical space you have to work with, and look for places that are high potential and have high opportunities. So these are from a very basic level, when you’re waiting for an elevator, or when you’re sitting at a lounge, or windows that face an open street or an open plaza, or large empty walls in conference rooms? Or could you hang something in a conference room that stimulates ideas and make people more creative? You know, you can engage with the brand and the materials in different ways you can put window clings on vinyl claims, you can put QR codes that link to videos or text or narrative experiences with headphones. We’ve even thought of we were thinking of an idea of like, if we had a blank wall, could we have a contest where an art student could paint a mural every year and we would just cover the cost of the paint, right? So you got to look for these these areas of opportunity that are kind of your blank canvas to showcase these elements of the brand. And I’ll just shout out you know, this is simple stuff. But some tools and resources that don’t overlook Etsy M picks is the king for printing stuff. They have the best quality. Society six has really cool really cool products. So you can be creative with and vinyl graphics and window clings, and things that are that look great, but are not extremely permanent, are really important. Because you know, one to five years in the future, you may want to refresh things. So you do have to think about putting things up, but then also have some flexibility as well.
Shiro Hatori
I love the suggestions and your your top three or step process on how you can go about creating this physical experience. It’s great. I remember one thing you mentioned around like creating a space that outlives your time was one thing you said I think on our previous call, I really liked that as well. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you mean by by that?
Chris Alexander
Yeah, and this, this was a, a way of thinking that came up in our very, very early brainstorming sessions. Everybody came to the table with their personal aesthetic views, the favorite colors, favorite types of things to look at. And what we tried to do in those initial meetings, when we were kind of distilling down the core concept was to remind folks that we’re all here to be creative and think of ideas, but we all have to put on a hat that that we are now representing the School in 50 years. So what is a concept? What are ideas that if we put it on the wall, are going to outlive our time working here, probably. And that actually creates just another it’s a challenge, it creates another filter to make sure that things are not just trendy, you’d be surprised you put something on the wall. And three years later, a student walks in, and they’re like, Oh, that looks old. And so really trying to make sure that you’re thinking of the visual representation or physical objects or physical spaces that are going to stand the test of time. And that was really helpful for us to eliminate ideas that were really interesting, really cool, but more kind of exciting and trendy. And then when we think okay, you know, it’s 2023 in 2033, is this still going to go on the wall, he’s still gonna feel proud of this work. And that was a really good sort of filter to put the ideas through.
Shiro Hatori
I love that. Yeah, you can’t get too caught up in the noise of today, I think bigger picture and think, you know, how can something great today? Be around and we’ll be valuable? No, past my tenure, right? And you can look back and say, Hey, like I was a part of this. That’s fantastic.
Chris Alexander
One, and I’ll also add that it’s related to you know, I mentioned our timeline, and that public health has been kind of bubbling up at NYU for 90 years. It started with one course, right? So the work that we’re doing in that conference room at that moment, thinking of ideas, you know, we’re working on behalf of those people that did the work before us. And so we better honor all that blood, sweat and tears. And so whatever we create, it needs to be a strong idea that’s going to resonate over time. So there’s we did feel a lot of responsibility for for the concepts we chose and how we execute it and put it on the wall, literally, in the space and it kind of made the work feel really important.
Shiro Hatori
It’s fantastic. I’m curious like this is this the first time I’ve had a tough conversation around creating the physical space, you’re building your buildings out and your campuses out to match your brand narrative and what you what you stand for? And do you think that there’s an opportunity more for marketing folks like yourself, you know, communications titles, brand experience titles, to be involved a little bit more in the development of Kancil, campus architecture, you know, schools are always constantly building, you know, and renovating and adding buildings and new new features to their campus. And I wonder if there’s an opportunity, like yourself to be involved more with their schools as well.
Chris Alexander
I certainly hope so. Because I know, in the realm of digital work, we are increasingly vying for a smaller and smaller shares of attention. And it’s harder to get eyeballs on the stuff that we produce. So you know, if you think beyond the social media and the YouTubes, and the emails and the, the print mailers and stuff, you know, if you can have a different platform, a different Canvas for this work that you’re doing, I think, is a really exciting opportunity. So and I’m thinking, you know, large art on walls, that the installations that I talked about, you’d be surprised how important and amazing it is to have a window cleaning that’s facing out on a on a crowded street, like, you want to talk eyeballs, forget, forget Instagram, like you’re gonna have, like People 24/7 walking around seeing your thing. So I hope it’s an opportunity for the future. And I think some of the resources I mentioned, you know, that season, the Olympics is of the world and kind of vinyl application types of materials, they’re making it so you can create stuff cheaper, that is less of a commitment. That is, if it’s less of a commitment, and it’s easy to refresh, it’s usually easier to sell to the higher ups to leadership to say like, you know, this would be cool, if we did it, here’s how much it costs. And in a year from now, if you hate it, we can take it down. There’s a lot more flexible, cheaper tools to express all of these brand ideas in a physical space. And I just feel like it’s a really, it has been an amazing opportunity for me that I just sort of stumbled into. And I think it when I think of the larger sort of portfolio of the platforms and things that we work with, and communications and marketing. You know, we’re like I said, we’re just fighting for the smaller slice of the pie and those eyeballs. And if you have other opportunities to show off your work. I think it’s it’s a it’s a, it’s a great thing to have.
Shiro Hatori
I really liked that perspective. Yeah, it’s it’s something that I’ve thought about as someone who works in branding, you know, like to also be a part of that physical waste and stuff like that field energy that you get in real life. And so that’s, that’s fantastic. Monitoring. Chris, good about our listeners here today. Where could some of our listeners follow up with you to understand what you’re working on to know an IU public health, global public health is up to?
Chris Alexander
Yeah, well, first, I’d say check out our website, public health.nyu.edu. And on the homepage, we have a building tour video that walks through, visually all the things I mentioned and more. So definitely check out our website. I do want to shout out since this is a podcasting audience. One of the things that my team works on is a podcast called IMG, pah. And we work on telling the stories of this sometimes invisible work that our students, faculty and alumni are doing to keep our communities healthy. So you know, really proud of that, and really proud that we have the opportunity to capture those stories. So it’s called the IMG pH podcast. Check it out on the apples and Spotify as and all those things. And lastly, look me up on LinkedIn, connect with me, Chris Alexander, NYU, on LinkedIn, you’ll find me and I’m happy to connect and, you know, meet other folks who are interested in this stuff.
Shiro Hatori
Thank you so much, Chris. It was awesome having you on today. Yeah,
Chris Alexander
thanks again for the opportunity. And it was great to talk to you. Thank you, Chris.
Shiro Hatori
Thanks so much for tuning in as well. Check us out next episode. Thanks so much.
