What about a Career in Advertising?

I would like to begin with excerpts from an email I received from one Abraham Kayode on Saturday, May 19, 2007: “I am an avid reader of your articles… and must confess they are highly educative and informative- they have helped me in my researches and assignments in school. I hope to attain the height you have reached someday because you are someone I admire even if I do not personally know you. But I am proud to have someone to look up to in this profession because my family never wanted me to study mass communication, their argument being that all one ends up becoming is a ‘miserable journalist.’ But I want to prove them wrong…”

Abraham is actually a final year student of mass communication in one of our State Universities in the South-West, while his burning passion for advertising is highly commendable. It is very unfortunate that our academic accreditation deliberately ignores the growth and changing nature of the advertising field; and dismisses advertising study as a subset of mass communication, marketing and journalism programmes.

Advertising is seen as just one arrow in a marketer’s quiver, with sales promotion, direct marketing, personal selling and public relations becoming the alternatives for aiming at consumers. When recently those alternatives achieved greater status, some renowned American marketing communication experts were quick to predict the death of advertising. I believe the ‘mistreatment’ of advertising stems from its misleading traditional definition as a “paid-for form of communication through the media about products, services, or ideas by an identified sponsor, non-personal, and designed to be persuasive.”

But this definition may have been disrupted within the last decade, e.g. to say advertising is “paid for” rids a company’s own website. Also to term advertising “non-personal” would have precluded most Internet communications (utexas.edu 2000). The Internet has made advertising more interpersonal in approach, thereby assuming the attributes of interaction and discourse.

Advertising is beginning to become more integrated into the media environment such that it is no longer easy to distinguish promotional messages from the news or entertainment (e.g. Michael Power concept for Guinness) that surround them; in the process the message ends up being public relations. Soon, attempts to differentiate advertising from other forms of marketing communication will be difficult- it is important that the elements in the promotion mix are coordinated and linked together such that they complement and reinforce each other’s impact on a potential customer.

The use of “Integrated Marketing Communications” (IMC) is therefore an attempt to redefine communication concepts and programmes including advertising. If Kayode’s family sees journalists as ‘miserable’ people, what would be their reaction if they found that prospective employers are in fact not keen on engaging graduates from advertising programmes? Some advertising ‘seniors’ actually indicate that they see little value in studying advertising in an academic environment. To buttress this skepticism, the much revered David Ogilvy once questioned the value of advertising education in a university environment, vis-à-vis its ‘insulated atmosphere and tunnel vision,’ which dissipates the sense of intellectual curiosity usually associated with effective communication.

Unlike many traditional academic disciplines, advertising lecturers hardly succeed when they are equipped only with theoretical knowledge but lack advertising industry experience, e.g. of the numerous academic projects on which undergraduate and graduate students regularly seek my guidance, 90% are usually meaningless, betraying lack of practical experience on the part of their supervisors.

Sadly, innovation is still non-existent in our tertiary institutions otherwise by now there should be new courses studying the Internet and digital communication; there should be new emphasis on strategy and creativity. More graduate and undergraduate courses should explore the complexities of creativity, strategy, new media, IMC, and branding relationships. A principal founder of advertising education in universities, Dr. C.H. Sandage, is reputed for challenging graduate students to be ‘architects’ and not ‘brick-layers.’

While architects are visionaries in the building process, preparing the blueprint and also understanding all efforts needed to implement the job, bricklayers merely follow a prescribed plan and miss the holistic job. Sandage’s submission is that advertising lecturers must understand theory as well as practice, orchestrate strategy and tactics so as to have a thorough understanding of the problem and its solution.

As long as advertising is still taught as part of other disciplines then it cannot offer the architectural vision for building a stronger discipline and an enlightened advertising industry. So far, our advertising curricula have only succeeded in building obstacles to bigger, progressive thinking. Industry sectorial groups need to come to the aid of our universities by establishing solid participative relationships with them. Such groups should have strong internship programmes in place and well-funded too.

We could have an Advertising Educational Foundation that will come up with programmes capable of providing a level of contact with the business world, e.g. the American Academy of Advertising (AAA) and the American Advertising Federation (AAF) do support student competitions, professional development and visiting lecturers drawn from the business community. An incongruous analogy with our situation is the fact that this article serves as excerpts from a paper I would have delivered at a South-West Federal Polytechnic but 48 hours to the time, there was a riot on the campus… and the school was shut!

Otherwise advertising is interesting, needing people with oral and written communication skills; people who think creatively and strategically; people with presentation skills; people who mix well and have common sense; people who can solve problems and keep pace with technology.

The glamour of the advertising world (with debt as stigma to Nigeria’s industry, I am not sure if our advertising does not require a renaissance) traditionally attracts many more job applicants than there are openings. New jobs are usually created as the economy improved and generates more products and services to advertise, e.g. telecoms. Layoffs are, however, common when accounts are lost, major clients reduce budgets, or agencies merge. Also what agencies pay new entrants could be better though many employees, in addition to straight salary, receive extra compensation, such as profit-sharing, performance-based bonuses, etc.

Since traditional definitions of advertising no longer make sense in light of developing technologies, advertising educational programmes that muster the courage to think creatively in recasting tradition will build smarter, stronger, bolder and braver advertising people.

To Abraham Kayode, I say: “If you do not mind being a perpetual student of marketing communications knowledge who keeps believing God for a commensurate financial reward, then wanting to emulate me is not a terrible idea at all.”