Advertising Minor: Degree Information

The goal of this course is to give students a realistic view of how a contemporary advertising agency functions. Students visit agencies and host guest speakers who work in all departments: creative, print and broadcast production, account service, planning and research, media, PR, and promotions. Particular attention is paid to career path and the importance of partnerships. Students shadow agency professionals and participate in meetings, brainstorm sessions, or client briefing. Students research and create reports of their experiences and collaborate on the creations of an “ideal” agency.

The marketing and advertising industry is grounded in the supremacy of ideas and is constantly adjusting to emerging communication platforms. This class examines those adjustments and emergence in depth to understand how effective ideas continue to come to life across digital and social media. We’ll explore and define how consumer, category, and platform insights matter. We’ll consider and develop strategic foundations that support ideas across multiple media. We’ll dive into the tools marketers and agencies use to power ideas today. Assignments throughout the semester will introduce students to exercises in developing content for existing and emerging digital platforms while exploring the relationship between humans, and existing and emerging technologies to create innovative campaigns. Marketing and advertising guest speakers will join the faculty in reviewing assignments and offering feedback on assignments.

Ethnography is the primary tool of anthropologists and is a powerful method for analyzing cultural dynamics, objects, and settings. A basic understanding of ethnographic approaches enables artists and designers to work more sensitively, effectively, and ethically in the public sphere. This course introduces a variety of ethnographic methods, including traditional participant observation, life histories, interviewing, visual ethnography, and ethnographic marketing. Students achieve a basic understanding of ethnographic approaches and apply them in their own ethnographic fieldwork. 

This course explores the seamless integration of several media in a single campaign. Media covered include television, print, PR, radio, and a variety of digital platforms. Students learn how communication vehicles such as packaging, product design, store design, advertising, promotions, PR, and corporate communications work together in a campaign, over time, to shape a brand. Guest speakers showcase histories of integrated advertising and brand management. Students work together in creative teams and client teams to develop, create, and execute an integrated campaign.

The goal of this course is to give students an overview of the retail landscape and the opportunities that exist for artists and designers in this fast-paced, growing field. Students study traditional and nontraditional media, external media (broadcast, print, direct, and out-of-home) and internal media (store and fixture design, point-of-sale, and product development), promotion and event marketing, guerilla tactics, and new media. Presentation skills are stressed. Students work in teams to conceptualize a retail campaign.

This course explores the power of the spoken word. Students integrate the voice with visual communication utilized on social media platforms, the internet, TV, radio, and so forth, and attend recording studio sessions with professional voiceover talent. Students write various pieces for the voice and attain the skills necessary to develop any audio broadcast assignment from concept stage through final air-quality production without supervision.

This studio is about designing for an unfamiliar context or user. Assignments will include products in which meaning/identity/cultural context is a primary consideration. Students will be required to conduct design research into a user group with which they have no prior experience. This might mean designing products for users from a culture, spiritual practice, subculture, gender identity, socioeconomic, physical or cognitive ability status other than their own, or an industry or class of products with which the student is completely unfamiliar. Emphasis is on developing design solutions that reflect an appropriate awareness of cultural context and empathy for an unfamiliar user while avoiding unconscious bias, stereotypes, and cultural insensitivity. Students will work with “clients” from the unfamiliar user group to evaluate and develop their design solutions via sketches, models, and prototypes.

Psychology is the science of behavior and mental processes. Psychologists use scientific methods to study the behavior and the mental activity of humans and animals. Psychologists search for the causes of behavior both within an organism (biology) and within the environment (experiences). This course introduces students to the broad discipline of psychology, focusing on theories and research explaining behavior. Major areas include, but are not limited to, motivation, sensation, perception, learning, cognition, development, stress and health, personality and psychopathology, and psychobiology. Students gain knowledge of the terminology and methods used in psychological science including fundamental principles, people, and theories important in the field while learning to analyze, synthesize, and critically evaluate ideas, arguments, theories, and opposing points of view regarding fundamental psychological principles. 

This course provides students with an overview of graphic design practice. Students concentrate on building visual and typographic communication skills as well as the vocabulary necessary for critical analysis. These introductory level skills are explored through static, static-narrative, interactive, and time-based media. Topics covered include basic visual and typographic principles, composition, type and image integration, sequence, and craft. Students are also introduced to the design process, which includes research, ideation, iteration, refinement, and implementation. Image/image-series, logotypes, mark-making, digital presentations, and booklets are possible outcomes of this course.

Building on their initial exposure to web design and development in Foundation: Media 1 and 2, students engage in a thorough examination of current web-publishing standards, concepts, and development tools. Topics covered in this course range from web design and development—including Internet-based art practices, interactive screen-based publication formats, commercial websites, generative and algorithmic art, information design, and digital storytelling—to broader screen-based aesthetics and practices. Machine-to-machine as well as human-machine interactions are presented. Creative and investigative approaches to network-driven concepts are encouraged.

Since the advent of print and the printing press, text, image, graphic design, comics, and advertising have played significant roles in cultural formation. This course examines the history of mass reproduction of printed matter from the advent of modernity, including books and periodical designs, to the present.