Meet PACO: Mark Dominiak, Media Strategist
By Elizabeth Reinhardt
Mark’s comic collection is well over 6,000 at this point, and this year, he got to meet Stan Lee.
“I’ve worked with somewhere between 125 and 130 different brands,” Mark said. “My work’s total worth is somewhere around $1.5 billion in advertising.”
As a media strategist, it is Mark’s job to develop a media plan that will place a brand into the radar of the desired demographic. One of Mark’s favorite examples of this is a project that he worked on with Tampico. Their target audience for the campaign was Hispanic moms. By buying specific time slots for their radio ads, Tampico was able to reach this demographic when it meant the most.
“We wanted to be on a mom’s mind when she was either going to pick her kids up from school, or on her way home from getting them,” Mark explained. That’s where the strategy comes in with the title media strategist. “To do this, we bought radio spots that were in a very specific time frame. It’s not traditionally how it’s, done – you don’t usually buy one spot a day – but it is what we needed to make this campaign work with the budget we had.”
Fantastic Four and Hellboy star Doug Jones graduated from Ball State a year before Mark.
It can sometimes take a while for a strategy to work itself out, but when it does, everything else seems to click into place. Mark developed the patience required to solve these puzzles by watching his grandfather interact with others. His process of learning to understand people is how Mark developed his own psychological analysis strategy of putting himself in the target audience’s shoes, whether that audience is general market or multicultural.
In Mark’s opinion, every business should be concentration on how to reach the multicultural markets.
“Too many people in key decision-making positions are still in the old mindset of general market first, followed by niche markets,” Mark said. “They keep thinking about how to do things based on that idea, instead of how we have to do them now. Instead of wondering how to make a half-percent in one area, they should be trying to figure out how to make one percent in the multicultural markets.”
