Advertising and Media Channels

Doel vak

• Demonstrate critical understanding of concepts, theories, and frameworks from academic articles on advertising communications and media channels
• Integrate information throughout the course content with personal insights to formulate arguments and opinions on key advertising topics and questions
• Demonstrate theoretical and practical knowledge on how advertising works, designing, and managing advertising activities across channels
• Apply theoretical concepts and frameworks about advertising to real-life cases, evaluate effectiveness of advertising using data, and provide managerial insights from quantitative analyses.
• Communicate and collaborate effectively with an international team and reflect on all roles and contributions within the team
• Work with a team on business cases to design persuasive presentations, in English, to both academic and professional audiences.

Inhoud vak

In the past decades, businesses and consumers are overwhelmed by the increasingly complex digital advertising landscape. Advertising is present in a variety of channels, from online (in your social media feed, in your search results, or on websites you browse) to offline (on your TV, in your mailbox, or alongside buildings and streets). Furthermore, the practice of advertising is continuously influenced by technological advances and new social media, allowing firms and consumers to interact in many ways along the customer journey.

In this context, this course aims to integrate academic and managerial insights in the domain of advertising as a part of marketing communications. The course will discuss insights from important theories and frameworks in the domain of communication and persuasion. Overall, the course will address a number of issues that are relevant to the design and management of advertising campaigns: setting objectives, selecting appropriate channels and content, evaluating the effectiveness of advertising, and supporting new product launches.

During this course, students will further their theoretical and practical understanding about the changing ways in which companies and consumers interact and communicate, how advertising works in a social media world, how to manage multiple media channels, and evaluate the effectiveness of advertising. This course takes a quantitative approach, combining theoretical understanding of concepts and frameworks with quantitative analysis of real-life data.

Aanvullende informatie onderwijsvormen

The course uses a blended approach to enhance the learning experience for the course objectives.

Lectures are interactive and incorporate digital tools to assist the understanding and application of the lecture content. Students are expected to prepare academic articles before class, with concrete guidance for each article.

The seminars are meant to challenge students in developing analytical and technical skills that are relevant for advertising effectiveness and multimedia contexts, such as deriving insights from data exploration and visualization, and implementing market-response models. For this purpose, students will be working with statistical software (R is recommended because its enhanced features, but others are also possible) and real-life data.

Some of the seminars will have a “flipped” format: students need to complete pre-class activities before coming to the in-class seminars. These activities take the form of knowledge clips followed by practice exercises or questions. The activities are considered essential for your learning experience in the course.

Finally, student presentations constitute an important learning point, because they integrate the result of quantitative analyses with the application of theoretical insights.

Toetsvorm

Individual exam (70%)
Group assignments (30%)

Literatuur

Academic articles available through the VU Reading Lists, and listed in the course manual on Canvas.

Aanbevolen voorkennis

Working knowledge of a statistical software such as SPSS, RStudio, Stata etc. is highly recommended.

It is also strongly recommended to have completed Customer and Marketing Analytics.