Making her mark in digital media

10/24/2014 1:02 PM

By Kelly O’Brien ‘15

What started as selling ads to Peoria pizza joints for Bradley’s student newspaper evolved into a successful career in digital media sales at a Pulitzer-Prize winning publication for Kathy McKee ’94.  Now a national account manager at the Washington Post, she applies the advertising acumen she acquired on the Hilltop to her work near Capitol Hill.

As one of 30 digital sales representatives worldwide for the Post, McKee builds web-based advertising solutions for an abundance of brands, including universities, hospitals, museums and more.  Such a job couldn’t be found in the classifieds section of a paper when she studied advertising at Bradley.

“My career didn’t exist when I was in school,” she said.  “It’s been quite a progressive path.”

A digital media sales class may not have existed when McKee called Bradley’s campus home, but she took a collection of courses that equipped her for future employment.

“I’m grateful for the foundation I built at Bradley,” she said.  A Department of Communication major in Advertising, Kathy stated, “I took classes like photography, graphic design and basic technology that made me more employable and ultimately placed me in jobs.”

With the Post for the past 10 years, McKee is proud to work for a company that has emphasized ethics since its establishment.

“We have a 100-year-old newsroom, and the ethos that broke Watergate has not changed,” she said.  “The only thing that’s changed is the need to do things more quickly.”

To meet the media’s need for speed, “the Post” increasingly invests in technology.  With 40 million readers, the paper and its staff must think global and mobile.  A prominent part of this technological boom is social media, according to McKee.

“Social media can be an incredibly useful tool,” she said.  “All our reporters are trained to break news on Twitter.  But it’s a tattoo that’s neither private nor temporary.  You have to think of it as a lifetime arc of your activity.”

Similar to a tattoo is the impact Mckee has made in her digital media sales career since graduating from Bradley.  She advises current students to follow their professional passions as she did.

“You don’t care if you’re working until 11p.m.,” she said, “if you love what you’re doing.”