Advertising and Marketing

BA Advertising and Marketing begins with you. It’s about unleashing your creativity and letting you define your degree programme as your strengths and interests change. We understand the interdisciplinary way marketing and advertising work in the real world and work with employers to ensure we teach the skills they need.

Programme overview
Every organisation needs marketing, from sportswear manufacturers to technology start-ups to not-for-profit organisations. The global annual spend on advertising is worth billions, and each of us sees adverts throughout every day. The growth of artificial intelligence, social media and other online influencers make this an exciting time to work in advertising and marketing.

This degree enables you to work creatively and focus on how marketers communicate what they have to offer to consumers. We teach this within a comprehensive marketing education with a large degree of choice in the modules you study. These modules cover current communication theories and methods alongside critical marketing subjects such as Consumer Behaviour, Brand Strategy and Market Research.

Our modules are taught by academics who are experts in their field, with many having significant professional advertising and business experience. You will gain a firm grounding in advertising and marketing theory, understand how these theories work in practice, and develop the key skills employers value. You are supported throughout by an academic tutor – offering support on academic work and time management.

In addition, in your first year, you will also study two further subjects from other departments. We call these your ‘minor subjects', which account for two modules of 40 credits each. You can choose from creative modules (e.g. design, film, creative writing), business modules (e.g. entrepreneurship, management, business intelligence), maths-orientated modules (e.g. accounting and finance, economics), social science modules (e.g. sociology, psychology) and even applied computing or languages, amongst many other options.

As part of your studies, we welcome guest speakers from some of the UK’s top advertising, marketing and design agencies, as well as leaders from brand-owning organisations. In your final year, you will work on a real-life advertising project for an advertising, design or media agency; in the past, these have included Saatchi & Saatchi, BT and HoWoCo. Such experience is invaluable for building contacts, strengthening your CV and taking the next step into the advertising industry.

Key facts
Our careers team work with you from day one, challenging you to think about where you want to work after graduation and helping you build and develop your CV with the experience it needs to secure a successful graduate position in a sector and company of your choosing.

Programme outcomes
Marketing provides one of the greatest varieties of graduate opportunities. We recognise this, and our programmes have evolved accordingly. Advertising and Marketing channels students more towards the Agency side of marketing, with the capstone module focusing on working on a consultancy project with an agency. Still, the flexibility of our programmes means you can tailor them to your own ambitions and goals.