Adjunct Assistant Professor, Marketing and Public Relations
When Perry Drake started teaching in the M.S in Direct Marketing program, the industry was limited to a focus on direct mail and telemarketing. With the plethora of advances in technology that have occurred over the past decade, the marketing landscape has changed drastically, and so has the program itself. Through courses he teaches in the newly formatted and renamed M.S. in Integrated Marketing, Drake prepares his students to use mobile, viral, and social media to reach out to their customers and to consumers. He also coaches them in taking advantage of the many Web and network-based tools that have revolutionized the marketing industry.
While working for Readers Digest as director of Database Marketing Services, Drake decided to join his wife in the Drake Direct marketing consulting firm. He brought this entrepreneurial business experience into the classroom by teaching courses that include database management, mining and modeling, Web analytics, and SAS data mining certification. In 2002, he co-authored Optimal Database Marketing: Strategy, Development, and Data Mining, which is used for teaching courses at NYU-SCPS, as well as at universities around the world.
Drake believes that to be successful in marketing, one must adapt to the consistent evolution of industry standards. The rate of change in the industry has been "phenomenal," he says, adding that until recently, "there were no books or best practices or true experts in the field, because it was simply all so new." The lack of relevant texts available to professors and students makes courses taught by active professionals, like Drake, all the more valuable.
"I want my students to be successful, to land the best job, or the major promotion," he explains, "and the only way to stay up to date, is to read as much industry news as possible." His methods seem to be working. In 2009 and again in 2010, a team of his graduate students earned semifinalist status in the annual Google Online Marketing Challenge—placing in the top 50 and top 100 respectively out of some 1,500 schools worldwide.