Norman, Oklahoma - Meet one of the faces of the brave new world of the digital generation.
Her name is Liz Maute, and she's a 21-year-old senior at the University of Oklahoma's Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication, where I'm teaching this fall.
She says she's an advertising major, but that's just a ruse. What she really is is a budding entrepreneur who's learning how to use interactive digital technology to help her realize her dreams and ambitions, make a decent living and ultimately help revive New Orleans' Katrina-battered economy.
I met Liz last Saturday at the end of "Digital Initiative" week organized by Gaylord College Dean Joe Foote that brought ten top people from the fields of journalism, public relations and advertising to the OU campus to explain to students how they can build a career by mastering the complex tools and techniques of the Internet.
She was one of hundreds of students, many of them preparing to soon enter the job market, who came to learn from experts in the use of digital technology like Jill Agostino, news editor of New York Times.com; Deborah Young, chairman and CEO of advertising giant Publicis Dialog; Mike Bohn, vice president of advertising solutions for Yahoo.com; Reggie Murphy, director of research services for Gannett News Service, and Mike Krempasky, vice president of Edelman Public Relations.
Again and again, the students heard the message that they need to navigate the constantly changing landscape of the Internet if they hope to compete for jobs in 21st century journalism, advertising and public relations.
"Through the entire week, I learned that the digital generation is definitely going to revolutionize the way we communicate, do commerce and socialize," said Maute, one of about 30 students who turned out at the Gaylord College computer center Saturday while 85,000 people were pouring onto the campus for the Oklahoma-Utah State football gam. The students participated in hands-on demonstrations of digital technology applications like "spring widgets," "search engine optimizations," "blip TV" and "Dreamweaver."
"It feels like the world is becoming smaller, in a good way," she said after hearing executives of Tribal DDB, a Dallas ad agency, describe a website they developed to change the negative image of the U.S. in other parts of the world. "That's a key example of the possibilities that are unfolding. There's so much we haven't explored, we're so new to the digital age."
Maute, a vivacious redhead who grew up in Norman, joined two of her childhood friends who are also seniors at OU - interior design major Kelly Miller and English major Erica O'Hair - to create a web-based company that does custom home decor, which they advertise on their facebook profiles.
"People see my profile on facebook and I get thousands of views," she said. "It's really cool. All my facebook messages go to my cellphone so when people get excited about seeing my work, I can reply right there and take orders. It's so bam, bam, bam."
When I asked her the name of her company, I didn't understand her reply, so she offered to write it out. It's "FNcute.com," which she informed me stands for "fucking cute."
She explained the unusual name. "People see it and say, 'That's so fucking cute.' They just tell me their color scheme and their favorite decorating elements and I run with it. I'll paint a canvas that matches their walls, mirrors, tissue boxes." Miller then takes the color scheme and does the interior design, while O'Hair suggests the furniture. "We can start with a bare room or with what they've got and quickly give them a complete new décor."
Have they made any money, I asked. "Yeah, just enough to pay for rent for a studio and supplies and promotional materials," she said, adding that she and her partners are planning an event in October to raise funds to open a store on campus.
But that's not all she's doing to take advantage of the digital age. "I'm just learning html and I took my first course in Dreamweaver, which is a program to build interactive sites.
At the same time, she and four fellow seniors are competing with four other teams by producing a full scale ad campaign for Beauty Brains, a salon spa chain with stores in Oklahoma and surrounding states. "We're just in the preliminary stage and I'm the creative director. I'm very excited about it."
The five teams will present their ad campaign on Dec. 5 to the CEO of the ad firm that once had the WalMart account. "He will declare the winner, and he's been known to hire on the spot," she said.
But even if her team produces the winning ad campaign and she's hired, Maude doesn't plan to stay in advertising. Her ultimate goal is to move to New Orleans, where her 28-year-old boyfriend is from, and "start a boutique agency to help small businesses get back on their feet."
Will she use any cavemen like those in the popular Geico ad to promote her agency, I asked. "No, no cavemen," she said.
Her live-in boyfriend, Drew Cooke, is a collage artist with degrees in math and English from OU. "He's my favorite artist," she said. "He's working on a 15-week project where he saves all his trash, none of mine, and each week makes a two-by-four frame and uses the trash to make a statement about consumption and recycling."
But that's not the most interesting thing I learned about this fascinating young woman. She's the daughter of a single parent, Judith Maute, a professor of law at OU, and didn't know her father, a lawyer in Tulsa, until she almost a teenager.
"He found out that he had a daughter when I was eleven-and-a-half," she said. "He's been an incredible father. He has a wife and three children - Gray, Gracie and Graham, seven, four and two - they're my half-brothers and half-sister."
But there's an even more interesting fact about Liz Maute. Her professor who teaches advertising, David Tarpenning, "is really special because my great grandmother, who taught here for 27 years, was his professor. Her name was Louise Beard Moore - they called her 'LBM.' She's my dad's grandmother and she used to read stories to us when I was in Montessori school and I never knew she was my great grandmother."
In fact, there's a bench across from the Gaylord College named after Louise Beard Maute, where her great granddaughter often goes to sit and think about the part of her life that she only recently discovered, and the exciting opportunities of the life she's building in the future.
