Elodie Huston FCLC ‘18: Fulbright to Marketing Extraordinaire
By Camille Hermida-Fuentes
If it wasn’t for COVID, Elodie Huston’s interview would have been in person. We might’ve gone to the Argo Tea on campus not far from The Observer office where she once worked on layout. But like almost all meetings these days, we could only speak over Zoom, when she visited our virtual creative writing workshop. Elodie called in from her hometown of Sheboygan, Wisconsin in the midst of helping her mom out with a move, a large English Mastiff hovering slightly off camera. After talking to her, you realize she’s someone who’s about helping others, equal parts hard work (“if you can learn it, do it”) and compassion (“what’s fulfills me is helping other people”)—her success, both during and after her time at Fordham, is proof of what a strength that combination is.
Elodie Huston FCLC ‘18
Communicating with customers has been the difference between staying open or closing permanently for many businesses during the pandemic. And that’s where Elodie comes in. After graduating from Fordham in 2019, Elodie began working at Attentive, a text message marketing solution that has grown exponentially since she interned as an undergraduate and was among the first 20 people to join the team. As online shopping became the new normal, Attentive grew—they now have over 500 employees. Elodie specializes in content marketing: writing case studies, blog posts, and guides pitching the benefits of the company’s solutions, and working with major brands like Coach, Sephora, and Urban Outfitters. If you’ve ever made a purchase after getting a text about a new sale, it might very well have been that Attentive helped send it. Early on in the pandemic, Elodie also became responsible for publishing data trends and compiled a major report that detailed what consumers were and were not buying. “People were buying lipstick at the beginning, based on what we saw. But they stopped buying pants—something that was a running trend,” she said. Something that might seem apparent to us now, but certainly wasn’t when the pandemic first started. And by now, we’ve seen firsthand how important information like this is for so many companies. The study informed how several major brands would go on to navigate the months to come.
Elodie’s career thus far could be a commercial for how varied the opportunities an English major can give you are. She didn’t originally plan to work in marketing at all. Raised in the relatively small town of Sheboygan, she came to New York for college, and had originally thought she would work for a non-profit. Huston is also responsible for the revitalization of The Comma, FLC’s now well-known literary magazine. “Everything is branding,” she told me—and in her time at The Comma, she did just that, branded and shaped the magazine into the well known student journal it is today. Her experience working on layout for the The Observer contributed to how she was able to rework The Comma into its own independent publication.
After college, Huston was awarded a prestigious Fulbright fellowship and made her way to Germany. She taught in a city called Mainz, which she described as a major adjustment with “fewer people than the Upper West Side,” and worked with high school students there. Her path to the Fulbright wasn’t easy either—she told us she went through eight drafts of her application essays before throwing them all away and starting over. But Elodie persisted and soon enough, would spend a year working as a teaching Fulbright fellow. What really stood out about her time in Germany is her unique approaches to teaching German students about American culture and politics, and coming up with methods of studying American life in ways I would’ve never thought of myself. “What I did with the older kids was I used ‘This Is America’ by Childish Gambino, and we analyzed the lyrics, we watched the music videos, I gave them an explainer of the different signifiers.” Huston told us.
Speaking on her decision to become an English major, Huston said, “I love to read. So that was never in question. What was in question is what I wanted to do with it.” Huston dove into working at Attentive while it was first growing, and grew alongside them. She told me, “Because I was an English major, [Attentive] really let me write and edit all the time.” Even early on her career, she noted that “I got to learn a lot about marketing because they let me be really hands on with projects.” And what really shone when I talked to Elodie was that enthusiasm for the written word, how she is always pushing herself to keep working on approaching her job from creative and more exciting angles. Huston also writes press releases, a medium sometimes not necessarily thought of as strictly “creative,” but still finds a way to make them come to life. She notes that it can be a creative act, saying “you have to change your tone, you have to change the content of what people are going to be finding important.” Elodie has also had experience ghostwriting for various organizations over the years, and told me how “it lets me repackage things that I may be writing and put it through someone else's perspective,” believing in the potential to find ways of centering storytelling in all the marketing work she does.
Elodie Huston FCLC ‘18
Elodie feels that her English major skills are what make her stand out at a marketer, and believes strong writing skills will become even more useful in a COVID world with people who work remotely. “Traditional avenues that you may have followed have shifted and your first touch with people is going to be over email or messages. I think that's a really strong position to be in. Knowing how to think critically and to convey a message to your audience is just super important no matter what you do or where you are.”