Professors Swap Classroom for the Agency World
Jan 26, 2009
Click here to download the PDF of the AEF report.
Many professors in American universities today teach advertising-its influence, its contributions and its evils. But how many can tell you how to respond to an RFP? Or how to write a media plan?
The answer, surprisingly, is not many. As with most subject areas, professors come to specialize in advertising through academia-something in their studies piques their interest, and they focus on learning about it. But advertising is not a theoretical pursuit, which is why the AEF runs the Visiting Professor Program.
The program carefully matches university professors- some who specialize in advertising, marketing or communications, some who focus on liberal arts like anthropology and American studies-with ad agencies, a two-week program that benefits both parties. There, the professors shadow a particular person-whether that be an account executive, creative director or planner-and receive the closest thing to on-the-job training they could ask for.
"I'd never actually worked in a marketing firm or ad agency, so the experience really benefited me in terms of giving me more managerial as well as corporate perspective," says Leonard Lee, a professor of marketing at Columbia University who was a guest of Publicis in New York last summer. He walked away from the experience with a newfound appreciation.
"What surprised me quite a bit is the fact that beneath all the creativity, there actually is a lot of process. In fact, the whole advertising process has a lot of structure, as well as organization and rigor," he says. "Creativity has too often been associated with a free-wheeling atmosphere and a little bit of fuzziness. But there actually is a lot of process that is involved."
And it's not just the professors who benefit.
"As an industry, we've never suffered from having an abundance of resumes cross our desk," says Linda Sawyer, CEO of IPG's Deutsch, which recently hosted a professor of anthropology and sociology from Brandeis. "Even though it's just one professor, we now have someone going back to
Brandeis saying she would really guide people toward advertising as a profession."
Jay Liebowitz, a professor of information technology at Johns Hopkins University, spent two weeks with interactive agency R/GA in New York in the summer of 2007 and now functions as an advocate for the agency and industry inside the classroom.
"I didn't have a real keen awareness as to the difficulty in terms of people moving into the advertising field, especially graduates coming out of college," he says. But since returning from his summer with R/GA, he says he has "sent several graduates to be considered for employment there."
For more AEF coverage:
A New AEF for New Times
The Advertising Educational Foundation COmes of Age
Professors Swap Classroom for the Agency World
AEF Speakers Program Links Theory and Reality
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