When Daniella Cross came to the University of Guelph-Humber, she was hoping for a change. Always on the lookout for a fresh opportunity or adventure, the newly opened university stood out to her, so she enrolled in the Media Studies program in 2003. Since coming to campus, she’s been on a path that’s seen her try to conquer Toronto politics, navigate careers in marketing agencies, technology and higher education, and travel to more countries than the average head of state.
Before she came to UofGH though, Daniella was already an adventurous spirit. She had just finished her first year of high school when her parents decided to leave their home in Toronto and make good on a longstanding dream. For the next three years, Daniella and her family lived on a sailboat in the Caribbean Sea, travelling from island to island while Daniella completed high school by correspondence.
It was a sharp departure from the life she’d known in Ontario, but Daniella got so used to the tides and the palm trees that eventually, she was ready for something completely different. Back on terra firma, Daniella decided she wanted to go to university, and so she soon started at UofGH.
After her time on the boat, Daniella was eager to get involved with everything campus had to offer. Never one to take a half measure, she found the time to become a residence assistant, help start the women’s rugby team, join the Guelph-Humber Student Association, was elected vice-president administration of the Humber Students’ Federation, and the Chair of the HSF’s Board of Directors. It was a busy time, but whenever Daniella wasn’t working on her many extracurriculars, she was finding her calling in Media Studies.
“We got a lot of opportunities to work closely with faculty members and it was an environment that set up my peers and I for success,” she says. “In my Public Relations courses we created real plans and real campaigns. We raised $30,000 for Sick Kids Hospital, and thousands more for Camps United. You could really see the value of those experiences — it wasn’t all just hypothetical.”
That real life learning found its biggest outlet when Daniella and her peers tried to get a classmate voted into Toronto’s city hall. They’d talked in their courses about low voter turnout among youth and decided that a young candidate was the best way to fix the problem. Together, a class full of PR students decided that Shaun Bruce would vie to be the city’s mayor, with Daniella serving as campaign co-chair. They created a policy platform that centered on public transit, community safety and affordable housing, wrote speeches, held rallies and attended debates. They even attracted the attention of a Comedy Network reality show called Punched Up. The show’s comedians soon found that, though a 22-year-old candidate for mayor sounded like a joke, Daniella and her classmates were totally serious about running a winning campaign.
“We got a lot of opportunities to work closely with faculty members — it was an environment that set up my peers and I for success.”
Amid a crowded field, they had a respectable showing and although they lost out to David Miller (by just over 300,000 votes), their campaign made a splash. Youth voter turnout was up, Daniella was inspired to write a research thesis on youth in politics, and she was invited to New Orleans to receive a prestigious award from the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC). The Shaun Brice for Mayor campaign was also the recipient of the Canadian Public Relations Society’s ACE Award in the student division in 2007, and although the awards were a nice payoff for the effort she and her classmates put into the campaign, she and some of the other campaign team members received job offers from people impressed with their work.
After trying a few different companies on for size, Daniella went to Research In Motion (BlackBerry), where she did business marketing for North American strategic accounts. When the chance arose to move for work to London, England, Daniella and her husband hopped the pond and began British working life. As the business marketing manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Daniella was soon jetting across three continents, managing materials and marketing campaigns in a dozen different languages.
“I was working with stakeholders from all over,” she says, “So there were a lot of cultural nuances to get a handle on whenever we made regionalized materials. It’s never as simple as just translating a phrase because the same words mean different things in different places.”
After four years with BlackBerry, Daniella accepted a role as the head of UK marketing at an online advertising agency in London before ultimately coming back to Canada. After nearly a decade travelling all over the world, she’s returned to someplace familiar. For nearly three years now, Daniella has been Humber College’s manager of international marketing and communications. Still though, she does her fair share of globetrotting.
“PR can take you in a lot of different directions, whether that be marketing, advertising, social media, or another country,” she says. “Sometimes you need to move on for a great opportunity and that’s not a bad thing.”
Learn more about Media Studies at UofGH.