Creative Advertising

Our BA(Hons) Advertising degree has been designed in consultation with marketers, brand managers and ad agency professionals to create informed practitioners ready to shape the future of the industry. This forward-looking course is highly vocational and will equip you with the relevant skill sets, market knowledge and professional contacts to begin a fulfilling career on graduation.

Studying at Falmouth will also put you at the heart of a thriving and innovative creative media community, giving you plenty of opportunities to collaborate with students on other courses including public relations, journalism, graphic design, photography, digital media, animation, film, creative events management and fashion.

Level 1

Techniques of Persuasion

Title: Techniques of Persuasion
Tutor: Daisy Griffith
Level 1, Term 1

Description:
This unit tackles two key challenges facing undergraduate students entering their first year of study: writing in a professional context, and presenting work to an audience. The first part of this unit will focus on a general introduction to professional writing and the skills and disciplines required in the production process such as researching, interviewing and writing in a prescribed format, accurately and to deadline. Students will explore the production and editing process with particular focus on copywriting and sub-editing, and will explore the rules that govern writing for two-way communication exchanges. This will culminate in students researching, writing and laying out material for their own copy-led project for digital media. Alongside the writing component, students will engage in an intensive, highly practical series of classes aimed at developing their skills and confidence in presenting. Students will also be encouraged to develop the ability to critique one another’s presentations in positive and productive ways. This unit incorporates a guest speaker programme.

Assessment:
Info coming soon

Creative Approaches to Problem Solving

Title: Creative Approaches to Problem Solving
Tutor: Rob Kitchen
Level 1, Term 1

Description:
When prompted, most students are able to come up with one or two ideas to communicate the benefits of products or services to an audience of their peers. Significantly more challenging are briefs for products or services that are aimed at non-student demographics and/or that are complicated or outside of the typical student milieu. Examples could include a raised toilet seat aimed at carers of elderly or disabled people; an indexing and abstracting database aimed at academic librarians; a prescription-only paediatric vaccine aimed at medical professionals. This unit is an introduction to creative thinking, through interpreting and cracking tough advertising briefs – some of the fundamental building blocks of creative promotional practice. The unit facilitates an understanding of the briefing process together with the generation of ideas and concepts with a view to producing extensive open-minded, speculative and informed solutions to a wide range of briefs in future units. Projects explore concept-generation skills and the application of writing and/or design/art direction as a means of effective message transmission. Creative problem solving techniques covered will include techniques designed to shift mental states to foster creativity; techniques designed to reframe problems and techniques designed to increase the quantity of fresh ideas for any given brief.

Assessment:
4 x 300+ word essay (50% Set individually)
1 x presentation of altered object (25% Set individually)
1 x class assignment/presentation (25% Set individually)

Analysing Advertising

Title: Analysing Advertising
Tutor: Caroline Shapiro Wyatt
Level 1, Term 2

Description:
Much of this course aims to help students towards professional practice by providing the practical and technical skills they will use in the workplace. However, throughout the course, students will be asked to reflect on practice in both theoretical and historical contexts to help them become informed practitioners. This unit provides an introduction to critical and analytical thinking. As the borders around conventional promotional spheres have diminished, contemporary promotional activity has become characterised by relentless convergence between different realms of practice. This, the principal theoretical unit at Level 4, explores the external contexts of today’s promotional cultures with a particular focus on promotional collaborations, intertextuality, the ‘ownership’ and branding of public spaces and emerging debates around marketing and environmental concerns, marketing to children and the use of sexual imagery to sell products and ideas.

Assessment:
A 15-minute group presentation (50% of mark)
A 2,000-word essay (50% of mark)

Business and Applied Technology

Title: Business and Applied Technology
Tutor: Jason Whittaker
Level 1, Term 2

Description:
This unit provides students with an introduction to marketing and advertising as concepts and professions within the contemporary context of ‘convergence’ and integrated communications. Teaching includes a focus of advertising within the marketing mix and the impact of the digital environment. Lectures and seminars will discuss issues such as patterns of consumption, permission and the platforms and contexts within which digital productions operate, with an emphasis on Web 2.0 practices.

Alongside theoretical contexts for the operations of convergence within contemporary digital media, this unit will also attempt to adapt students’ knowledges of the promotional industries gained from exposure to marketing throughout their lives via concurrent practical sessions during the week.

Assessment:
A 2000 word essay on the following topic: “How is convergent media and the principles of Web 2.0 affecting contemporary advertising and/or marketing practice.”
A presentation on the “live” brief set during practical sessions.

Why We Buy

Title: Why We Buy
Tutor:
Level 1, Term 3

Description:
This unit studies the scientific bases for consumers’ purchasing decisions and the many strategies employed by marketers to make their goods and services more attractive to potential purchasers. The unit will show how consumer information is obtained and used by marketers looking particularly at psychographics to gain insights. The unit will also discuss other psychological processes related to the ‘path to purchase’ (and post purchase activity), particularly in the context of digital marketing. Cognitive reasons for such phenomena as brand preference, peer influence, and addictive activity will also be studied. A week-long ‘unit-within-a-unit’ will offer a combination of lectures, seminars and screenings of documentary and fictional films involving the practice of communications relating to propaganda, persuasion and promotional culture within a range of theoretical contexts.

Assessment:
The assessment for this course is comprised of a 2,500 word essay.

Convergence in Communication

Title: Convergence in Communication
Tutor:
Level 1, Term 3

Description:
Info coming soon

Assessment:
Info coming soon