Big Thinking about Teaching Advertising

The 2014 Advertising Teaching Workshop at AEJMC in Montreal featured a segment titled "Group Think: Sharing Ideas, Growing Ideas." Workshop participants broke into five groups to discuss issues affecting both the advertising industry and advertising education. Because these issues influence all our programs, we're sharing our collective thinking by way of this summary.From big trends to big data. From evolving models of delivery to evolving creative portfolios. And partnering with other units across our campuses. We hope you will find some ideas that will stimulate discussions within your programs and help move your courses and curriculum forward in the ever-changing advertising world. Or perhaps you'll find some interesting gems that might inspire your research.Big trendsAt the conference, the emerging factors coalescing to shape the advertising industry as we know it today were distilled into three broad trends: analytics, relationships and delivery. Analytics is an ever-changing area as technology continually improves and refines the industry's ability to gather and synthesize big data. The use of analytics informs both content creation and content delivery, with such factors as return on advertising investment, search engine optimization, search engine marketing and advertising effectiveness driving this trend.Relationships - both building and maintaining them with engaged consumer audiences - continue to impact the industry. Four areas in the relationship trends were identified: engaging the audience, providing relevant communication, reaching influences and proactively responding to privacy concerns.Delivery of the advertising message needs to be both simple and shareable. Underlying this premise are these four influences: the impact of global messaging, the demand for diverse and ethnographic-inspired communication, the creation and dissemination of branded content and the mandate for seamless digital and social media strategies.Even with these three big trends buffering the winds of change within the advertising industry, many traditional conceptual models such as the creative brief are still appropriate and relevant. However, such traditional templates now need to be used with analytics, relationships and delivery method in mind.Big data and analyticsBig data and analytics were identified and combined as one of the three big trends, and this area also was the focus of one of the workshop teams. Big data includes consumer data, consumption patterns, media usage and purchase behavior. When asked to define or conceptualize "big data," both data mining and technology were discussed. While big data is clearly quantitative, it was also noted that there are some qualitative aspects that are important. Advertising agencies struggle with too much data, and perhaps one solution would be to hire computer scientists to interpret it. To be useful, the data must be in a language that both strategists and creatives can understand and use.Student perceptions of big data and analytics are that they are technical and boring. Students, on the other hand, often see themselves as creative. In the past, research data were more manageable. Today everything is online in real time and requires ongoing monitoring. This results in an enormous amount of data. Clearly, our students need training. Tomorrow's new big data specialists might have a background in computer science.This could lead to more interdisciplinary work with other departments such as computer science.This raises the question: What do we want our students to know about big data and analytics? First, we don't want our students to be afraid of big data. In fact, it should be their friend because understanding big data will make them more employable. They'll also appreciate being able to interpret reports because they can use them for evidence to persuade their number-oriented clients from the marketing world. …