The Digest: Fairfield County Marketing & Media Pros

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Digest.

We hosted an event about AI in marketing this week, and it inspired me to reimagine how I prepare this newsletter. And before you wonder, no, this newsletter is not written by AI.

My co-founder in 203 Creates, Dave Persaud, organized and hosted an event this week in partnership with UConn Stamford and the AI Collective. The event, “Marketing Jobs in the Age of AI: Myth, Reality, and Your Next Move” included two UConn professors, an AI expert, and yours truly.

The goal was to demystify how AI is actually being used in marketing today, and how you can prepare for a future where jobs are significantly different because of it. UConn MBA Professor Wei Chen teaches grad level courses on generative AI to prepare students for the workforce.

In his view, entry level jobs will change from “doers”, or people manually performing tasks, to “evaluators”, or people who check the work of AI agents. To become an effective “evaluator” you need to actually understand the human elements involved and what the desired outcomes are for the process you evaluate. Where that domain expertise and training comes from is an open question.

So what changed with this newsletter? Good question. It’s more of a work-in-progress update, but I’m building a much more robust job listing section with AI. Each week, I manually scan saved searches on LinkedIn to curate relevant jobs for marketing and media leaders in Fairfield County, CT. It takes about 30-60 minutes to search LinkedIn, scan listing, copy/paste the best into Beehiv, and validate old job listings are still active.

But not anymore. Today’s job listings were pulled together with Claude helping me pull much more targeted listings, much faster, using RSS feeds. My goal is to build out a comprehensive job listing site within the next two weeks, which feels very achievable given progress in 24 hours.

Along with speeding up the process to develop a more robust site, Claude analyzed trends and developed insights from all previous job listings in every edition of this newsletter.

Here are a few highlights:

• 564 total job listings since last year

• 166 unique jobs listed

• 69 unique companies listed

• Top companies listed by # of job postings: Conair, vineyard vines, Spectrum

• 18 days - average time jobs were available

If you have questions or ideas about how to make this job site more valuable, please feel free to reach out. And if you’re hiring, or know of open roles, definitely reach out to share the listing.

One final note before sharing this week’s news. The Video of the Week is for all you nostalgia fans. I watched it for hours this week! Enjoy.

What’s Next?

This digest is a starting point. The goal is to build a community of senior marketing and media professionals in Fairfield County. If you have news to share, a campaign to highlight, job opportunities, or an event to promote, please email me at [email protected] 

Best,

Shawn