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Playbook for a winning Super Bowl ad: Embrace risk, seek emotion

Joe Arney — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:19:23 +0000

Playbook for a winning Super Bowl ad: Embrace risk, seek emotion Joe Arney Fri, 01/30/2026 - 09:19

Ryan Huff

On Super Bowl Sunday, playing it safe is a guaranteed fumble.

At least when it comes to the commercials.

Courtesy Coca-Cola

“If you show up at the Super Bowl and your ad is just OK and nobody talks about you, you've wasted millions of dollars,” said Jeff Gillette, an assistant teaching professor of advertising at the College of Communication, Media, Design and Information. “If people are divided about whether they love you or hate you and they're talking about you, that's a big win.”

Gillette, a former creative director with 20 years in the advertising business, knows how nerve-wracking it can be to view the commercials and hope for the best as public reaction unfolds. He helped create Coca-Cola spots for six Super Bowls at renowned ad agency Wieden+Kennedy.

Coke’s 2014 Super Bowl ad was particularly memorable for Gillette. The 60-second spot featured young American women signing “America the Beautiful” in a blend of English and their native tongues—including Hebrew, Spanish and a Native American dialect—to celebrate the nation’s diversity.

The scrutiny started immediately, with the ad content debated for days on Facebook feeds and morning news shows.

“We told the Coca-Cola marketing team beforehand, ‘You are going to get backlash, and we need you to back it up,’” Gillette said. And in doing so, they were rewarded: “After it aired, they saw a dip in consumer sentiment for maybe a minute, but then it spiked afterward. There were significantly more people who defended that spot than tried to tear it down.”

Jeff Gillette

Gillette is now co-director of the strategic communication design master’s program, popularly known as The Brand Studios. As he tells his students, airing Super Bowl commercials aren’t for every client. To ensure that today’s going rate of $8 million for 30 seconds of airtime is money well-spent, companies need to have broad appeal to the 125 million people watching.

“If you're in a space that has a lot of competition—like beer, soda, cars—it’s a great opportunity,” he said. “The purpose of Super Bowl marketing is for an established company to persuade you with brand affection and brand emotion. It works when it’s either funny or pulls on your emotional heart strings. It needs to be big and bold, and not trying to sell you something. It’s about communicating on an emotional level.”

Gillette has also seen plenty of flops in his day, too. One that sticks out for him was Mountain Dew’s “Puppy Monkey Baby” campaign during the Denver Broncos’ win in 2016. The spot features a diaper-clad, pug-faced, dancing monkey handing out beverages to three young men on a couch.

“Somebody brainstormed that puppies, monkeys and babies all do well for the Super Bowl. So, what if we mixed them all together?” Gillette said. “You want to be out there and memorable. But you can't just be weird without any kind of a message. Even though some people liked the ad, it didn’t connect with me emotionally.”

Others, though, did make the connection—some critics called it that year’s best ad while others labeled it the worst, creating the divisive buzz Gillette said can lead to consumer attention.

While some companies’ ad concepts only get one Super Bowl in the spotlight, others continue to feature their stable of mainstays. Budweiser has their Clydesdales. Doritos loves user-generated content. And Coca-Cola’s polar bears—icons that began with 1920s French print ads—made a comeback during the 2012 Super Bowl.

Gillette and fellow creative director Hal Curtis dreamed up a fresh angle for those fluffy carnivores beyond the standard in-game advertisement. Would the audience watch a livestream of the bears watching the game?

The creative team used Xbox controllers—this was 2012, after all—to puppet the computer-generated imagery with prepared actions. This enabled the bears—one a Patriots fan, the other a Giants fan—to react with cheers and disgust to the game, halftime show and commercials in real time.

The risk paid off. Nine million people tuned in on phones and laptops for an average of 28 minutes.

“You never get that length of time for somebody to engage with your brand,” Gillette said. “At no time were we like, ‘Hey, go have a Coca-Cola.’ It wasn’t a hard pitch. It was just a brand experience that people seemed to like, because people love the polar bears.”

And apparently, on the eve of this year’s Super Bowl, Pepsi now loves the polar bears, too. More than a week before the big game, Pepsi rolled out a playful twist where a polar bear unexpectedly prefers Pepsi over Coke in a blind taste test of its zero-sugar sodas.

Game on. What’s Coke’s next play?

“If I were Coke, I’d ignore it and concentrate on making better advertising,” Gillette said. “What they shouldn't do is react. If they do, Pepsi gets what they were after: some much-needed attention as the No. 2.

“I don’t blame them, though. Pepsi has always been the challenger brand—and when you’re in that spot, you got to poke, you know, the bear.”

Ryan Huff is the assistant dean of communications and engagement at CMDI.

An advertising professor who’s produced Super spots for Coca-Cola shares what makes a commercial memorable during the big game.

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When retreat trumps the rise of global free markets

Joe Arney — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 19:34:07 +0000

When retreat trumps the rise of global free markets Joe Arney Wed, 01/28/2026 - 12:34

Joe Arney

For Colette Perold, seeing an imperial power throw its weight around in Latin America isn’t news—she’s an expert on how multinational IT companies have exerted influence in this part of the world.

What she finds curious about Donald Trump’s approach to diplomacy is how out of step it is with the desires of many businesses.

Colette Perold

While the interests of the state and corporations don’t always align, “what’s fascinating about the second Trump administration is that much of its foreign policy appears to undermine the liberalized overseas markets that allowed U.S.-based multinationals to become dominant,” she said. “For that to be replaced by this scattershot, unpredictable type of foreign policy execution is new terrain for them.”

Perold, an assistant professor of media studies at the College of Communication, Media, Design and Information, researches the relationship between media technologies, labor and foreign policy. It’s work she became interested in following her work as a labor organizer and an editor for NACLA Report on the Americas, a quarterly journal on Latin American politics and social movements.

In her best-known work, Perold traces IBM’s investment in Brazil—the company was a dominant force in the country from the 1930s into the late 1970s, and was effectively a monopoly in the region for decades—including how the company contended with, and overcame, labor movements and domestic pressure for economic autonomy. That research is the subject of a forthcoming book, which was supported by the prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.

The rise of IBM

IBM’s priorities largely reflected those of the U.S. government, which was eager to build a liberal international order as it expanded its influence and economic might in the post-World War II era. By kidnapping a foreign head of state and exhorting American oil companies to reinvest in Venezuela, Trump has signaled a return to a time when the nation’s interests were less global in scope.

How we got here

Seeing the Monroe Doctrine in the headlines was probably the first time most Americans thought of it since high-school history class. The doctrine was an early foreign policy declaration that established the United States’ opposition to European intervention in the hemisphere.

In reasserting the Monroe Doctrine, Donald Trump is returning to a period when U.S. intervention in Latin America was not just the practice, but the stated policy. That changed in the Good Neighbor days, but during the Cold War, the United States reasserted its interventionism in Latin America.

The 1990s marked a return to economics as the primary form of domination; today, “it looks like military intervention and other forms of ‘extra-economic’ coercion are becoming both practice and stated policy again,” Colette Perold said.

When Franklin Roosevelt introduced the Good Neighbor Policy, committing the United States to nonintervention in Latin American affairs, “that became the starting point for building a liberal hemispheric and international trade order, to remove barriers to trade and open markets,” Perold said. “Trump is retreating from all of that through his ‘America First’ diplomacy.”

IBM, she said, is a perfect example of how companies benefited from that liberal order. When the company arrived in Brazil in 1917, the tech industry looked nothing like it does today, but as it went from tabulating machines to mainframe computers, IBM was increasingly able to benefit from changing legal obligations, new regulations and shifts in labor markets.

“My interest here is understanding the technological changes alongside the political and economic changes, and how those feed each other,” she said. “By looking at these different players—the IT companies, the U.S. foreign policy apparatus, labor—we can understand, strategically, how we got to where we are today.”

The United States’ decades of commitment to that international order allowed it to stifle political movements in Latin America, most visibly to the benefit of companies like United Fruit, or industries like mining, Perold said. “But while no one really thinks about the unbelievable amount of political power IBM exerted in Brazil, it was very much part of building a liberal international order from the 1930s until its influence started to wane in the late 1970s.”

Signals in foreign policy noise

In examining the White House’s national security strategy, released late last year, she has found some potential signals in Trump’s noisy foreign policy execution.

“It seems like a lot of this strategy is motivated by the last two decades of increasing Chinese investment in Latin America,” she said. U.S. strategy, she said, is about expelling foreign powers, including a return to military force. China, Perold added, “is the subtext throughout the section of the document on the Western Hemisphere.”

“From the Trump administration’s perspective, the liberal trade order that gave us the rise of China is what’s hurting U.S. interests in Latin America. In other words, liberal internationalism was working for American interests in Latin America until it wasn’t—so now, our foreign policy is to directly dominate a sphere of influence, rather than manage it through markets.”

“By looking at these different players—the IT companies, the U.S. foreign policy apparatus, labor—we can understand, strategically, how we got to where we are today.”

Colette Perold, assistant professor, media studies

One of her favorite things about teaching this research, Perold said, is that few students are aware of the history at a time of both fast-moving foreign policy and rapid change driven by the tech industry. When she teaches students about the rise of Japan as a semiconductor giant in the 1980s, many are surprised to see, in U.S. media, the same language and signals aimed at China today.

“Two of the most influential of the so-called Atari Democrats,” who guided their party from organized labor to the largely nonunion information economy, “were senators from Colorado, and we have their papers right here at Norlin Library,” she said. “So, my students were looking at these documents about the supposed threat of Japan—and the real threats to organized labor—and going, wow, this is so similar to how politicians talk about China today.

“The beauty of teaching history classes about media and computing is seeing students get that shock, that this isn’t all new. It’s such a cool experience to watch them recognize that there is precedence to the cultural and technological phenomena they are steeped in every day.”

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.

A historian and labor expert says companies like IBM typified how the U.S. dominated the post-World War II global order. Trump’s retreat from that stage “undermines the free markets corporations want.”

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Want to keep your news local? It’s up to viewers like you

Joe Arney — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 17:27:11 +0000

Want to keep your news local? It’s up to viewers like you Joe Arney Tue, 01/20/2026 - 10:27

Joe Arney

Denver’s news landscape has been abuzz with the potential takeover of existing stations by Nexstar and Sinclair. An expert on local journalism says the laissez faire attitude of regulators means it’s up to viewers to make their voices heard on station content.

Last year, Denver’s broadcast news market was shaken as Nexstar and Sinclair—the two largest owners of television stations in the country—made moves to enter Colorado by acquiring the parent companies of 9News and Denver7.

Neither is yet a done deal. The Federal Communications Commission would have to approve the sale of Tegna, which owns 9News, to Nexstar; meanwhile, Denver7 owner Scripps rejected Sinclair’s takeover bid late last month. But relying on regulators or corporations to protect Colorado journalism is a poor strategy, said an expert on local news.

“The community needs to step in—that’s the only thing that can prevent these economic and social missteps,” said Angelica Kalika (PhDMediaSt’19), an assistant teaching professor of journalism at the College of Communication, Media, Design and Information. “When the community says, ‘we’re not going to watch this kind of content, this isn’t what we want’—if you are profit driven, you should listen to your audience, right?”

For that audience, Kalika said, takeovers represent a case of less choice means less voice. Consolidations typically mean fewer reporters to provide local coverage, encouraging stations to carry more national content. And the conservatism championed by both Nexstar and Sinclair would not reflect the progressive attitudes of viewers in the Denver metro market, while also encouraging the formation of a news desert. Kalika, who studies hyper-local news, said when the same people and companies own all the outlets, it means fewer editorial voices to watch town halls, board meetings and other news that’s ignored by larger, national players.

“Look at 9News—it’s iconic, it has a very clear brand,” Kalika said. “Is the community going to stand up to the corporations and make their voice heard?”

It’s something that worked, she said, when the Walt Disney Co. pulled Jimmy Kimmel off the air “and people screamed.” Search traffic on how to cancel Disney+ spiked as influential voices condemned the decision to suspend Kimmel.

“And Disney responded right away, because at the end of the day, it’s about the money. If you find organized ways to uplift community voices while hurting someone’s bottom line, you can have more control over your local media.”

A history of consolidation

Angelica Kalika

That public pressure will be required to counter an FCC that has enthusiastically embraced deregulation—not just in journalism, but across media in general. Last month, an $83 billion bid by Netflix to acquire WB stunned a legacy media industry already reeling from the tech industry’s continued incursions into their business—first by converting cable customers into streaming subscribers, and more recently by acquiring reliable revenue-generating intellectual property; the James Bond franchise, for instance, was sold to Amazon for $20 million last winter. The WB deal, which features a hostile takeover bid from Paramount Skydance, is the latest in the trend toward consolidation, which has seen takeovers by Xfinity, Disney, Amazon and others.

“The big tech companies have their eyes on local media and entertainment, because ultimately their goal is control of information and access to information,” Kalika said. “It’s worth analyzing the minutia of these deals and the climate at the FCC because the more omnipresent tech becomes here, the more we end up in bubbles of information—where we don’t know what’s real.”

Kalika knows what she’s talking about. She teaches a popular CMDI course on media and technology and has published several papers on the fall of legacy media gatekeepers—especially through the lens of TMZ, which in its pursuit of scoops has sometimes crossed lines that journalists will not. A paper she presented at the National Communication Association’s annual convention looks at TMZ’s decision to publish photos of the body of One Direction singer Liam Payne after he fell to his death; editors then removed the post without explanation amid public outcry.

‘No more adults in the room’

“If you find organized ways to uplift community voices while hurting someone’s bottom line, you can have more control over your local media.”

Angelica Kalika (PhDMediaSt’19), assistant teaching professor, journalism

“We’ve lost the social rail guards of what media is legitimate and what is not, what is trustworthy and what is not,” she said. While Kalika said there are trusted, verified sources in social media, those standards aren’t as visible as they were when most Americans got their news from local newspapers and network television. So, it’s harder to detect mis- and disinformation—especially as the algorithms populating news feeds are focused on engagement.

“There are no more adults in the room,” she said. “Everyone is now fighting for attention. They didn’t have to before.”

With the adults out, the natural place to look is at the kids. Kalika said legacy media’s inability to create authentic content for Gen Z—or to nurture them as an audience, the way Viacom did through properties like Nickelodeon, MTV and VH1—is a troubling indicator for the future, especially as many turn to YouTube, TikTok and others for news and entertainment.

“I can’t predict what they’re going to do, but I know they’re aware and trying to make changes in real time to the media and political environment that’s being presented to them,” she said. “I think they are going to use their money and who they’re signing up for streaming in order to get their voice and values heard and reflected in brands.”

That kind of pressure is going to require news organizations to be creative in order to maintain and grow their local audiences—something we might see in Denver as threats of consolidation loom.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if you start seeing some kind of profit-sharing business models, or people who provide direct financial support to a station in return for, say, a meet-and-greet event with reporters,” Kalika said. “I think we’re going to start seeing a growth in experimental business models.”

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.

An expert on local journalism says community pressure is key as consolidation changes Colorado’s media landscape—because when it comes to regulation, “there are no more adults in the room.”

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All together now: 2025 at CMDI

Amanda J. McManus — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 02:22:15 +0000

All together now: 2025 at CMDI Amanda J. McManus Mon, 12/15/2025 - 19:22

In a year where the college’s biggest story was its name change—following its integration with the environmental design department—CMDI’s community also found itself at the center of the biggest conversations shaping our time—from sustainability and A.I., to media literacy and the future of journalism.

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Code Reddit: How community guidelines, moderation can impede internet incivility

Joe Arney — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 16:33:37 +0000

Code Reddit: How community guidelines, moderation can impede internet incivility Joe Arney Tue, 12/09/2025 - 09:33

Joe Arney

If you were starting a new social media platform—one that tried to balance civil behavior with strong engagement—and were looking for an example to emulate, Chris Vargo has an unexpected one to offer.

Vargo, an associate professor of advertising at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s College of Communication, Media, Design and Information, has a new paper out in Social Science Computer Review that examines the role moderation and decentralized community rules have played in limiting incivility on Reddit.

“It’s not a moderated world in which we live in online, but I think what’s neat about Reddit is that they have these self-enforcing communities—and they work,” Vargo said.

Content accuracy was once an important plank for social media giants like Meta, which hired moderators to sift through the cesspools and remove false or misleading posts about the pandemic, Jan. 6 insurrection and other controversial topics. Uniquely, Reddit relies on volunteers to police posts that are abusive or inaccurate.

The paper, which Vargo co-authored with Toby Hopp, a fellow associate professor in the college’s Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Design, used machine learning tools to study 20 of the most popular subreddits—topic-specific communities hosted on the Reddit platform—in news and politics to understand how community rules could shape both engagement and uncivil behavior.

“Each subreddit is a different community, and they all have different rules and different guidelines on what’s acceptable,” Vargo said. Some groups, he said, encourage incivility—like sports subreddits where fans trash on a rival team, as well as some in the political sphere. “But you also have subreddits that don’t allow for that kind of incivility, or the casting of people as being out-group.”

That’s important because social media has empowered anonymous keyboard warriors to toss around death threats, dox opponents and belittle people for their ideas. Those kinds of uncivil behaviors—as opposed to just general vulgarity—were the focus of this research.

“For a democracy to have diverse voices, people need to feel safe posting content online,” Vargo said. “And we know from incivility studies that silencing and marginalizing opponents, telling them their viewpoints don’t matter, is a great way to silence them.”

“We know from incivility studies that silencing and marginalizing opponents, telling them their viewpoints don’t matter, is a great way to silence them.”

Chris Vargo, associate professor, advertising

When it comes to improving civil discourse on social media, the paper found the strength of a community’s moderation policies and enforcement correlated with greater civility among its participants.

“The more rules that are in a community, the better quality of communication in that subreddit,” Vargo said. “That’s important because building community is less about content moderation and more about content contextualization—this idea of sharing the truth when a poster might not be truthful, or saying when someone's misleading in a comment if they are being misleading.”

Changing perspectives on toxicity

The idea that one would consider Reddit a haven from, as opposed to a hotbed of, toxic behavior would have raised more than a few eyebrows in the past. But as major players in artificial intelligence have looked for new content platforms to scrape, Reddit has tried to sanitize its image. Those efforts have included removing problematic communities from the platform as well as putting moderation in the hands of volunteer users. Last year, the platform struck a $60 million deal with Google that allowed the search giant to train its A.I. models on users’ posts.

“We really expected Reddit to be pretty toxic, but I’ve done a couple papers recently that both point to Reddit being fairly safe, with not a lot of threats,” Vargo said. “I would say it is probably more of a model than it is a problem.”

When it comes to advertising and social media, engagement is the name of the game—one reason why name-calling, shaming and starting fights online tends to be rewarded by algorithms, which are designed to keep people on the site, in order to deliver more ads to users. In this study, though, Vargo said, internet indecorousness amounted to “just a tiny bit” of increased engagement.

“I think it’s great to see on a social media platform that those behaviors aren’t driving engagement quite the way we may have thought,” he said. “Because I don’t think it should be so easy to mine us for engagement, and for it to be so closely linked to hate.”

So, for both existing and emerging platforms, the idea of user-governed communities is worth consideration.

“I would highly encourage other places, like Facebook groups, to allow for those types of moderators to have that role over removing content and enforcing rules,” Vargo said, noting that his paper collected commonly used rules that keep successful subreddits civil.

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.

A new paper finds subreddits with clearly defined rules and active volunteer moderators do better at limiting incivility and encouraging engagement.

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Though some of the biggest social media platforms have ended, or drastically scaled back, content moderation, a new paper examines Reddit's volunteer model and finds that the right guidelines can limit incivility.

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John Oliver segment on public media gets major assist from CMDI

Joe Arney — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 18:13:50 +0000

John Oliver segment on public media gets major assist from CMDI Joe Arney Tue, 11/18/2025 - 11:13

Joe Arney

Host John Oliver introduces his show while the cover of Josh Shepperd's book is shown onscreen. Shepperd's work on the history of public media helped inform an episode on the federal government's dramatic cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Photo courtesy HBO.

When Josh Shepperd first discovered his research interest—the historical connection between the origins of communications research and public broadcasting—he was a University of Wisconsin graduate student eager to find his voice in the academic community

Today, that voice is carrying in directions he never could have imagined, with his work prominently featured in the season finale of Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, on Sunday night.

“My work is explicitly focused on democracy and media,” said Shepperd, associate professor of media studies at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s College of Communication, Media, Design and Information. “The idea that there is interest in preserving the different types of ways that institutions, agencies and people try to build and maintain infrastructure for access and recognition is core to my research.”

As far as late-night comedies go, Oliver’s show consistently scores high marks from critics for its humor, as well as the deep dives it does on controversial topics, which this season included sports betting, presidential libraries, A.I. slop and deportations.

Shepperd consulted with the Last Week Tonight team over the course of two months, culminating in a timely episode about the federal government’s drastic cuts to public media.

“You put in these long hours in the archives with the hope that people will consider the historical context of what you’re saying, and use that context to inform the decisions we make today.”

Josh Shepperd, associate professor, media studies

Oliver’s monologue was a thorough overview of topics raised by Shepperd’s work; the producers even used the cover of his book, Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting, as an on-screen graphic during the show.

“I think Oliver and his group learned about the book through the press I’ve been doing for the book, because a lot of folks at the show have close ties and sympathies with the public media sector,” Shepperd said.

Shadow of the New Deal is notable as the first academic attempt to present communication studies and public broadcasting as historically connected media reform enterprises. It was published in 2023, at a time when uncertainty about public media’s future—not to mention poisonous criticism of journalism in general—was growing. Shadow has since won the Book Award from the Broadcast Education Association and has been a finalist or runner up for prizes from four other organizations, including the American Journalism Historians Association and Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

The book led to press at close to 50 media outlets, including an interview with the influential NPR show On Point with Meghna Chakrabarti, a Q&A with The Chicago Tribune, as well as a feature by Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab over the past several months.

“What I like about the book being continually recognized is that it gives this research the opportunity to resonate beyond historians,” Shepperd said. “You put in these long hours in the archives with the hope that people will consider the historical context of what you’re saying, and use that context to inform the decisions we make today.”

Since he provided so much context for the show’s team, Shepperd was asked to recommend the names of other influential voices working in this space. Among those he listed was Willard Rowland, dean emeritus of the former School of Journalism and Mass Communication, which became CMDI a decade ago.

“I appreciate that CMDI is willing to steward humanistic work that explores democracy and media questions from a historical lens,” he said. “Historical research reveals a lot—but it takes a lot of time to do, and few communication schools have historians who ask these questions from that perspective.”

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.

When Last Week Tonight wanted to talk about cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, its researchers called communication historian Josh Shepperd.

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10 for 10: Notable newsmakers

Amanda J. McManus — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 06:11:51 +0000

10 for 10: Notable newsmakers Amanda J. McManus Thu, 11/13/2025 - 23:11

Because of the multidisciplinary nature of their work—and their fearlessness in confronting the biggest problems—CMDI faculty are regularly featured in local and national media. Here are 10 times over the past decade when major news outlets have featured our faculty.

The New Republic: Nathan Schneider wrote an essay on the Slow Food movement, arguing a slow computing approach could repair our experiences with technology. May 19, 2015.
The Denver Post: Chris Vargo studied Twitter data to see how vaccine misinformation spread and took hold in particular American communities. Sept. 27, 2017.
The Washington Post: Angie Chuang wrote an op-ed on the problems her race and journalism class tries to solve, and the struggle businesses like Starbucks have faced in confronting them. June 13, 2018.
Forbes: Casey Fiesler sat for a Q&A on the need for ethics in the technology industry, particularly social media. Jan. 14, 2021.
The Guardian: Elizabeth Skewes talked about her research on whether news media covering school shootings influences future acts of violence. May 12, 2023.
Scientific American: Leysia Palen talked about the dangers of information isolation during disasters that knock out telecommunications services. Sept. 11, 2023.
KUNC/NPR: Josh Shepperd talked about the history and influence of public media, especially amid great economic change in the journalism industry. April 10, 2024.
The New York Times: Following the publication of her most recent book, on romance writing, Chris Larson explained the circumstances behind the breakup of Romance Writers of America. July 24, 2024.
The Associated Press: Erin Willis was interviewed about her work on patient influencers and the language used in pharmaceuticals advertising. Nov. 14, 2024.
Denver7 (ABC): Jed Brubaker discussed the launch of the Digital Legacy Clinic and the need to proactively manage our digital footprints before we die. Dec. 11, 2024.

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Band together

Amanda J. McManus — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 22:14:09 +0000

Band together Amanda J. McManus Tue, 11/11/2025 - 15:14

Joe Arney

What role does CMDI play in the university chancellor’s vision for an institution that leads on sustainability? From left, faculty experts Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Caitlin Charlet, Hong Tien Vu and Morgan Young explored that question from their different areas of expertise. The group was photographed at the tree office, which was built by environmental design students and installed on the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder campus in 2016. Photos by Kimberly Coffin.

Phaedra C. Pezzullo is a professor of communication and director of the Sustainability and Storytelling Lab. She is an expert on communication’s role in shaping and influencing environmental and climate justice movements.

Caitlin Charlet is an associate teaching professor of environmental design, specializing in regenerative architecture and urban ecologies. Her research is situated at the experimental intersection of transformative design strategies, biogenic materials and the built environment.

Hong Tien Vu is the director of the Center for Environmental Journalism at CMDI. His work examines journalism and communication practices in addressing global challenges, from environmental degradation to societal inequalities.

Morgan Young has decades of experience in branding, strategy and creative execution—including managing campaigns about, and clients working in, sustainability. He is an associate teaching professor of advertising at the college.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Chancellor Justin Schwartz has been clear that he expects Colorado’s flagship university to be a leader in sustainability. But what does “sustainability” even mean? How do we get there without becoming discouraged? And in the current political and social moment, how do we advocate for the steps needed to advance sustainability?

At the time of this conversation, Hong Tien Vu—an associate professor of journalism and director of the Center for Environmental Journalism—was so new to the college that most of his belongings were still in boxes after relocating from the University of Kansas to CMDI. But he has a long track record of doing environmental journalism, so we threw him into the deep end with three faculty experts who have been doing sustainability long before it became a buzzword—whether directing ad campaigns, being mindful of building materials or podcasting about plastics.

This conversation was edited for length and clarity.

Vu: I’d like to start by asking each of you about sustainability, and how you define it.

Pezzullo: I’m a little nerdy about the definition of sustainability. There’s a new edition of my textbook out now, and we literally have a boldfaced definition I make my students memorize. So, for me, sustainability is the capacity to negotiate environmental, social and economic needs and desires for current and future generations.

Charlet: I rarely use the word “sustainability,” actually. There needs to be something regenerative—not just sustainable—in how we build and design. I’m interested in the long-term cultivation of regenerative relationships, in terms of materials, ecosystems and communities. For most of human history, we’ve built with what we’ve been able to grow locally, and it’s been able to go back into the earth. There was care for the environment, animals and humans. That changed with the Industrial Revolution.

Young: I come at this from a different perspective. Advertising and branding is both a leader and a follower in society. And at this moment, the industry is more of a follower, as people try to figure out what’s going on in this administration.

Pezzullo: I think, interestingly, that the ambiguity Caitlin was talking about, around the term “sustainability,” works well in this moment. It’s not a banned word, because we could be talking about anything. We could be talking about, for instance, economic sustainability.

There’s no reason why CMDI can’t be a leader in sustainability, particularly with the incorporation of environmental design."

Morgan Young, associate teaching professor

Vu: That’s an interesting point. I’d like to hear more from you all on what you’re seeing in the world as it relates to those organizations and sustainability.

Young: One example: I’ve done a lot of work with General Motors; in fact, I was the first person to make a commercial for an electric vehicle. It was the Chevy Volt, and it was their first ad talking about a sustainable future. And, in my classes, we do projects on how brands can create extensions to existing product lines. How can we use sustainability as a marketing tool to reach people who will respond positively to that information?

Pezzullo: I think it’s important to note that over the summer, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder transitioned away from all single-use plastics in beverage bottles on campus. It’s a great sustainability story, because it’s a tangible difference in our everyday lives that was made systemically, following the wisdom of the growing climate justice movement.

Charlet: I’ve been working on a documentary to collect the stories of how women have used collaboration as a foundation to run material science departments in academic settings, and work toward scalable alternative material solutions—and to show how they will have a major impact in changing our built environment.

Pezzullo: Collaboration is the only way to get things done for systemic change. Otherwise, you just have individuals, which isn’t enough to generate impact. In my work with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, we co-create story maps of the five most-polluted communities in Colorado. And working with those communities—instead of just about them or at them—creates better outcomes for public participation.

Charlet: Oh, I agree. Individual behavior won’t solve this problem. How do we educate a generation of architects and designers to choose better materials? That’s a radical notion for an architecture school. And the choices they make in building things will have a larger impact, because the construction sector is responsible for so much destabilization—humans, animals and topographies—and carbon emissions. There is no one solution, but biogenic and regenerative architecture and design is a basis for a scalable, forward-looking model.

Vu: We talked about how to define sustainability earlier, but Morgan, I wonder if you can talk about challenges you have faced in working with brands and avoiding overuse of the term, so they’re not accused of greenwashing.

Young: The reality is, even some of the brands we think of as being best for the environment are greenwashing. And as an advertising person, we’re not so deep into the business that we can look at their entire supply chain and influence that. If you hire someone like me, I’m going to focus on the best things to accentuate for a specific target audience—but what we’re missing is the rest of that chain that doesn’t have that positive impact. And in advertising, we have to be careful not to get in front of our skis and pretend a client is someone they’re not.

Vu: So that’s kind of mobilizing companies. Phaedra, I know you’ve done a lot in terms of initiatives that mobilize communities. Can you share some of the challenges you’ve faced there?

Pezzullo: Well, there’s a reason I use the word “sustainability” in my lab—I was launching it knowing the administration was going to ban words. I was set up to work with the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice office, and the week I was supposed to present to them, they sent me an email and said the department was being shut down. Part of what’s exciting about this campus and the Boulder community is that we’re not giving up on our values.

Young: To build on that, on this campus, we are different. I had 13 students with me in London for a month, and we were really struck by the complete absence of reusable water bottles there. They don’t have their Yetis or their Hydro Flasks like we do in Colorado. The point I’m trying to make is, much of the world is not there with us.

Vu: We’ve brought up current events a couple of times now. I wonder if we could talk about what the shift in public perception around sustainability has meant for your students, or the way you teach.

Young: A lot of my students are very business-minded. Some want to do advertising for the Environmental Working Group, the League of Conservation Voters or Earthjustice. But some would rather work for Chevron, Sephora or a fashion brand, like Kith. So, my goal is to create a student who can do external communications that show sustainability is good business.

Pezzullo: I think one of our biggest challenges, in communication, is A.I., which has radically changed our classrooms and what we understand labor to be—for creative content makers, for storytellers and for people just doing research. This generation is going to need to rise to the challenge of whether A.I. can become sustainable.

Charlet: I love this question. I’ve taught a design course where I challenge students to create a resilient ecological strategy for urban design with A.I. And the biggest thing that they learn is that it’s really hard to design with A.I.—it’s a tool like others already in use in architecture. It isn’t magic. In parallel to that, I ask them to consider the environmental detriment of using A.I.—not only the energy use, but the building facilities themselves. What impact do they have on communities? Where do the materials come from? Considering those two aspects of A.I. in parallel is really important for them to think about.

Vu: Caitlin, is that what students are looking for, from the standpoint of their career paths?

Charlet: Architecture is often seen as an exciting, but inherently safe, choice for students. It rests somewhere between the creativity of art and the challenges of engineering—so it’s a middle ground, and a respected profession. And I think the students come in with confidence, knowing they will be able to get a job. In terms of environmental design, there’s such a movement toward regenerative and biogenic architecture now, and the reuse and recycling of materials within buildings. There are a lot of firms with research departments that our students feel very comfortable and very prepared to go right into, and work on certifications like LEED, WELL and Passive House.

Young: I already mentioned advertising is more of a follower than a leader right now, but oftentimes, advertising is a reflection of society, as well. Right now, we see companies pulling back and hiding on sustainability issues. There are good companies—Patagonia, Outside magazine—that will continue to stand up and fight. But those that are more about their bottom line will let go of their sustainability programs to keep making money. This is where we have to work with our students, to show them these companies don’t have a moral high ground and will change with whatever the environment is in order to look good. But—is this important to all our students? I’m not sure, en masse, that they’re much more focused on sustainability than past generations were.

Pezzullo: There are lots of reasons to be alarmed and depressed, and I’m Italian American, so I can have, like, 100 emotions in five minutes. But I do have hope. You know, when South Park started—it was written by two �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder grads, you know—

Young: Yes! I went to college with them.

Pezzullo: That’s right, so you know they began South Park making fun of climate change, saying Al Gore believes in this thing called ManBearPig, and there’s no such thing. But South Park has, over time, recognized climate change does happen, and they even apologized to Al Gore. It’s important to remember that attitudes change, and we can shape public opinion in creative ways.

There needs to be something regenerative—not just sustainable—in how we build and design.”

Caitlin Charlet, associate teaching professor

Vu: Let me ask one final question. After listening to your colleagues, what’s one thing you’re inspired to explore?

Charlet: I’m inspired by and appreciate the chance to learn more about my colleagues’ work. Especially advertising—that’s a field I’ve never delved into. How might that impact the field I’m working in? Does it pertain to architecture firms and how they forefront buildings and construction ethics? Is there a measurable impact?

Pezzullo: That’s what I love about being part of a college like this—the opportunities to publish, edit, co-author or just talk to people in so many different disciplines. So, when we have a challenge like sustainability, we approach it from a more systemic, holistic perspective. We all bring different experiences from the institutions and companies and communities we’ve worked with.

Young: I think this college is in a rapid growth trajectory. We are very well positioned to have a big impact on the next generation—specifically, A.I. I’m inspired by people like Caitlin, who are already building A.I. into their syllabi, because I don’t have a handle on how A.I. will be incorporated into our academics. But I am worried about intellectual property rights around it—specifically related to advertising, but also areas like architecture, design and communication. Our college needs to tackle that—it’s a great opportunity for us to become a leader within that sector, because right now, nobody has a handle on it.

Vu: So, can CMDI be a leader in sustainability communication?

Young: Absolutely. I think our students are more concerned about this matter than those at other universities. There’s no reason why CMDI can’t be a leader in sustainability, particularly with the incorporation of environmental design.

Pezzullo: I absolutely agree with you, Morgan. It’s not that we don’t know the science, or what’s wrong, or what we could do to have a more sustainable future. It’s that we have to find ways to bridge differences, and that’s a strength of ours. With our expertise across a wide range of human expression, I really believe CMDI has a strong role to play in sustainability in the future.

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.

Photographer Kimberly Coffin graduated from CMDI in 2018 with degrees in media production and strategic communication.

When it comes to sustainability, individual actions aren’t enough. The same is true for how we look for solutions, so we asked a group of CMDI experts how collaboration might save the day.

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Illustration by Dana Heimes

Coloring outside the mines

Regan Widergren — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 00:27:14 +0000

Coloring outside the mines Regan Widergren Thu, 11/06/2025 - 17:27

Joe Arney

When you represent the interests of an industry like mining, you’re bound to make a few enemies.

In the case of PDAC—the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada—an increasingly sharp thorn in its side is a collective, Beyond Extraction, that finds creative ways to disrupt the mining group’s annual convention.

Its latest salvo? A coloring book that shows children a less-sanitized view of mining’s environmental impact than the industry acknowledges.

“All our projects seek to counter something PDAC is doing,” said Zannah Mae Matson, an assistant professor of landscape architecture at CMDI. A previous campaign, she said, involved creating an audio tour of the minerals exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, in Toronto, that drew attention to mining’s labor and environmental calamities.

For the coloring book, Beyond Extraction took aim at PDAC’s educational wing, Mining Matters, which builds lesson plans to extend the industry’s ideology into Canadian schools. Mining Matters also creates coloring books featuring kid-friendly characters who show that when mining companies complete operations, “they remediate everything, and everybody’s happy—the water’s clean, the trees are fine,” Matson said. “Whatever.”

The title Beyond Extraction selected for its book, What It Takes, counters Mining Matters’ message—that mines give jobs, technology, bicycles and so on. The project argues that the industry doesn’t give those things without cost. It explains technical concepts like free-entry staking and labor exploitation in ways that allow teachers and caregivers to start conversations with kids about adverse impacts of mining.

Simplifying the message

“The biggest challenge was simplifying,” Matson said. “The illustrations had to be colorable and fun, and the message had to be approachable.”

The book is not about ending mining; rather, it offers a more complete picture of mining’s human and environmental impacts. That’s crucial as the industry positions itself as a champion of the sustainability movement, since the metals miners unearth help power alternatives to fossil fuels.

“We don’t live in a world where nothing needs to be taken out of the ground—but there is this false dichotomy that if you don’t like mining, then you love oil,” Matson said. “We can’t fall into this trap of believing we all bear the same responsibility for mining because we all use a laptop computer.”

Instead, she said, we need to introduce lower levels of consumption while holding companies accountable to higher standards.

We need to create higher levels of standards to hold companies accountable, and introduce lower levels of consumption.”

Zannah Mae Matson, assistant professor

The Beyond Extraction collective has released a coloring book, which Zannah Mae Matson co-illustrated, in five languages. Its message is designed to disrupt the work mining organizations do to influence curricula and position themselves as champions of sustainability. Photos by Kimberly Coffin.

“As someone who’s been researching mining for a long time, and seeing how these companies cover up the problems they cause, I have serious doubts they will be the heroes of a green, more just future,” she said.

Matson’s research investigates how infrastructure impacts communities and the environment. That might mean what a road system in Colombia indicates about its colonial history, or how mining operations create lasting damage to nearby communities. It’s work that takes her around the globe but is especially prevalent in her native Canada, which has worldwide mining operations.

That’s a key reason Beyond Extraction is translating the coloring book into different languages. It launched last year, but this spring, translations into American English, French, Spanish and Portuguese came online—countering Mining Matters’ multilingual approach, which also has editions in Indigenous languages, like Inuktitut.

“It’s so problematic that these materials are presented in the languages of people that the mining industry has dispossessed,” Matson said.

The collective hopes to translate its coloring book into Dene, Inuktitut and Cree, but for now, it’s too costly for Beyond Extraction’s budget activism. The book relied on volunteer members’ expertise in media studies, landscape architecture and beyond; Matson also was one of two illustrators.

Like many researchers, Matson is used to collaboration. Beyond Extraction, she said, is next level.

“When you’re facing such complex problems, you need collective ways of resisting them and finding answers,” she said. “It’s nice to know you’re not alone, and feel your work is rising to meet those challenges.”

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.

Photographer Kimberly Coffin graduated from CMDI in 2018 with degrees in media production and strategic communication.

Mining companies are positioning themselves as heroes in the transition to sustainability. A coloring book illustrated by a CMDI professor is throwing shade on the idea.

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Building a case for A.I.

Regan Widergren — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 23:42:53 +0000

Building a case for A.I. Regan Widergren Thu, 11/06/2025 - 16:42

Joe Arney

Sandra Ristovska in the Wolf Law courtroom. Ristovska is spending the academic year at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences as she fleshes out her research into visual evidence and the U.S. justice system. Photo by Kimberly Coffin.

I am surrounded by people who are at the top of their fields, working in areas like artificial intelligence, democracy and equality, immigration, the environment. It’s incredible.”

Sandra Ristovska

The first day of classes at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder this fall was also the day Sandra Ristovska got the keys to her office—or study, as such spaces are known at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Unsurprisingly, she sounds much like a new student herself, excited about having so much to look forward to and full of energy and enthusiasm about what awaits her. (Like a new �鶹��Ѱ��student, she’s quick to gush about the views, which in her case include forests, palm trees and dramatic overlooks of Silicon Valley.)

“I am surrounded by people who are at the top of their fields, working in areas like artificial intelligence, democracy and equality, immigration, the environment. It’s incredible,” said Ristovska, associate professor of media studies and director of the college’s Visual Evidence Lab.

Being selected as a fellow to the center is a high honor. Among its alumni, CASBS counts a host of Nobel, Pulitzer and MacArthur winners, along with such luminaries as Ruth Bader Ginsburg and George Shultz, U.S. secretary of state under Ronald Reagan.

Just being included in such company would be distinguished enough, but at the outset of the yearlong residency, Ristovska learned she was awarded the Leonore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellowship in Communication at CASBS.

It’s a full-circle moment for Ristovska, who earned her PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania; she said it was “very meaningful and very special” to get an endowed fellowship from the family.

CASBS is renowned for providing a home for scholars engaged in pioneering research into complex contemporary problems. The interdisciplinary nature of each class of fellows encourages the kinds of stimulating conversations that help push researchers outside their niches and make broader connections to major societal challenges.

Ristovska is counting on that cross-pollination to help her in drafting her next book, tentatively titled Deepfaking Images, which will offer a legal and social history of the use of technology to manipulate evidentiary media.

New twist on an old problem

Although the use of generative A.I. to distort real images, or cook up fake videos, is certainly a contemporary challenge—the Visual Evidence Lab is examining this topic in depth—it’s just the latest tool in a problem going back more than a century. For instance, video can be sped up or slowed to distort its meaning, while photo manipulation is as old as photography itself.

What interests Ristovska about the use of visual assets in court is what such evidence indicates about access to justice.

“Oftentimes, the best-resourced party has the language and ability to use or challenge this type of evidence when it’s presented against them—or to hire videographers or software experts to present such evidence in the first case,” she said. “In criminal cases, this tends to tilt the scales in the prosecution’s favor.”

Published works of CASBS fellows are permanently stored in the center’s Tyler Collection; when completed, Ristovska’s book will be among them. It’s fitting, since already her work is benefiting from interactions with other fellows.

“We have lunch every day with the other fellows, and of course we all ask each other what it is we do,” she said. “It’s invigorating to tell people about my work, hear their excitement about it and also listen to their ideas for how the different things they focus on might get me to think differently about my book.”

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.

Sandra Ristovska’s research into video evidence and deepfakes is getting further refined during a prestigious fellowship at Stanford.

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