Senior Director of Marketing, GK Development

>> I'm Debbie Wodrich, I'm the Senior Marketing Director for GK Development Incorporated, and GK is an owner and developer of shopping centers and strip centers throughout the country. Wow I have a fun job, marketing is tons of fun. Marketing in itself is more than just advertising, it involves building a brand, building an image and delivering that message to your audience. Every day is a different challenge. I could be doing not only media placement, but planning our public relations contacts, helping our malls develop their mailing lists so that it's updated with the current media contacts; writing the press releases, making sure that they're newsworthy, gather all the information there and hopefully the media then will take those press releases and put them on their platform and get our word out for us. One of the programs that we've done at GK that I think is so fun and shows my passion for our company and marketing is we have developed our branding which is the image you want to portray to your audience. And in the print material for that we've used images or photos of people that are friends and family of our workers. And we work with a local photographer, professional photographer who's able to work with non-professionals and make them look like stars. And so those images of course we have the right to use in all of our marketing programs and the people had fun going to the photo shoot and doing, you know the modeling and in fact we just finished doing a model shoot where we videotaped it. And we're going to put our video tape on YouTube showing, you know how the making of a photo shoot which is a lot of fun. So you'll see Santa and dogs and the Easter Bunny and little children. It's just, you know a lot of fun. Well now that I'm in the corporate office there are much more standard to what you would think of as a business office. Christmas becomes, well pre-Christmas for me, because I you know you're planning Christmas song all year long even the year before, but the heavy time for a lot of work is like October and then by the time December gets here you know I'm already working in next year. I mean there are occasions that may be you know I could work from home on the computer because most of what I do at the corporate office is ordering media online or working with artists online. Certainly working with property teams online or on the phone because our properties are so far away across the country I, you know I can could work from home but it's easier to contact with the people in the office here in the corporate office and be working as a team when here. We get to go to our properties at least once a year so that we can, you know keep a touch with what's happening, to see the property, meet shoppers, meet you know merchants, managers, community leaders if we need to and make sure that you know some of our programs that we're implementing here have transitioned well out at the property level.