Cameron Jordan (’26) had just completed his freshman year at Ͽϲͼ when he landed a summer internship with a residential propane company near his home in northern Maryland. The organization, ThompsonGas, gave him a five-figure budget and one task: advertise on multiple platforms that were new to the company. This involved producing a TV commercial.
Even with only one year of college under his belt, Jordan says he felt prepared for this formidable task.
During his first two semesters at TMU, Jordan took courses like Business Communication, Social Media and Communication, and Pocket Studio. He also helped TMU produce a feature film during Winterim, serving as a first assistant camera and grip.
“All of those things, and especially the Winterim project, really gave me a sense of comfort and confidence,” he says.
ThompsonGas had a simple yet open-ended goal for Jordan’s advertising when he came on. They wanted him to find ways to reach a high-income market near the company’s corporate headquarters in Fredrick, Maryland.
As he began, Jordan applied lessons from class about how to communicate and operate efficiently within a corporate structure. “I would bounce things off of my manager, but for the most part I was just asking a lot of questions,” he says. Learning proper email etiquette in his Business Communication class paid off when his inbox started piling up.
Before the internship, Jordan didn’t expect to spend much time creating content, but he ended up taking hundreds of photos and videos and posting some on social media. In the process, he applied much of what he learned from a course called Pocket Studio, which taught him how to capture media and create stories with just the camera on his phone.
Prof. Jefferson Henson, who taught the course, says that Jordan took a special interest in the commercial side of storytelling, intrigued by expanding brand awareness and deepening brand identity. These lessons gave him a strong foundation to work from when he captured content for ThompsonGas.
On top of everything, TMU’s Winterim film production helped Jordan succeed in the internship as he collaborated with Distant Moon (a production house that has worked with big-name companies like Google and Chobani) to create a TV commercial. His previous experience helped him clearly communicate his goals for the commercial to the filmmakers.
By the time he finished his internship, Jordan was producing content on eight different platforms. One of his social media ads had a nearly 50% view-through rate. That means half the people it reached watched the whole ad, rather than scrolling away.
“Usually getting 15% of the audience to do so is really great,” Jordan says.
Henson’s goal for the marketing media program is that graduating students would feel at home in both corporate and creative worlds. He sees Jordan’s first year as a prime example of the kind of impact the program can make.
“I feel like it gave him the confidence to exist in those spaces and be humbly assertive there,” Henson says.
To learn more about TMU’s marketing media major, visit masters.edu/marketing-media.
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