The bachelor’s degree in advertising at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication is built on our innovative Creative Strategist Model, which emphasizes collaboration, flexibility, confidence and brave thinking for a changing world. Brand purpose and responsibility are woven into the DNA of our curriculum, which imparts foundational skills in writing, multimedia storytelling, design thinking, strategic communication, media innovation and digital content production as well as soft skills such as creativity, authenticity, courage, empathy and resilience.
This series of questions with Professor of Practice David Koranda, who is also the interim director of the advertising major, is designed to help you evaluate if a bachelor’s degree in advertising is a good fit for you and if it’s a career you would be interested in pursuing.
As the director of the program, he is a passionate about using curiosity to solve problems and exploring the many facets that make up the advertising industry. Read this Q&A to learn how advertising fits into communication, how the SOJC approaches the study of advertising and what to expect as a student in the advertising program.
Watch the full video Q&A with Dave Koranda
SOJC: What is advertising?
Dave Koranda: “What is advertising?” is not a simple question. And in a lot of ways now, advertising is a misnomer. What we're trying to do here is solve problems. Sometimes advertising is a solution to that problem. Advertising might be part of the solution to that problem, but the reality is that we're trying to get the students to think about what's a brand's problem or what's a client's problem, what's a societal problem, what is it we're trying to change?
There's an old children’s game where you would look at a picture and study it to determine what was wrong with it or out of place. In the SOJC advertising program, we're training students to find what's wrong with the picture and then, as they find out what that problem is or what's missing in that picture, they develop strategic solutions, which can include advertising.
How do you get into advertising or start working in advertising?
First off, you study advertising, and you study it with people who understand it and are forward thinking, so that you can become a thought leader when you do get into it. But studying it helps give you a basis in how advertising works, how communication works and how brand communication works. Once you've studied that and while you're studying that, you begin to make connections with professors, with people who are in the industry, with alums, with other students. It starts with studying it, practicing it and then reaching out and connecting with people.
Why is a degree in advertising important?
A degree in advertising helps save time in the long run. It's four years of studying, and those four years enable you to:
- Make connections.
- Understand the language of advertising and the process of advertising.
Getting a degree in advertising saves time and gives you a real boost to be successful in the industry.
What can you do with an advertising degree?
There are a variety of things, many things that anyone can do if they have a degree in advertising. Not all of them are in advertising directly. You can work within the media, you can work for brands, you can work for companies that are peripheral to advertising. You can work in ad agencies, or internal ad agencies at big companies such as Starbucks, Google, etc., that have their own ad agencies.
A degree in advertising is quite helpful in almost any industry that somebody would go into because it gives you a broad perspective of how advertising is the engine for the economy. Understanding how advertising works can help you understand how businesses work. A degree in advertising can help you understand how industries communicate.
What makes a good advertising degree program?
What makes a good general advertising program is a program that's current. The professors aren't talking about the way advertising used to be. It's a program that deals with how advertising works and how it will probably work in the future. It's professors who are enthusiastic and staying forward thinking. It's full of students who are engaged.
What makes SOJC’s advertising program special?
What makes the SOJC special is we don't just cover the basics that any school that teaches advertising might, but the people who are teaching it are highly engaged with advertising, with communication, with culture, with the students and the alumni. If you scroll through LinkedIn and look for alumni from this program, it's mind boggling what they're doing now. It's sometimes mind boggling to me to think about and look at the people who are here and what they're doing now. Students here can connect with those people. Students here connect with each other. Older students are constantly helping the newer students. There's a synergy between alumni, professors, current students, new students, etc.
Those things are extremely valuable to somebody who wants to go into the profession. The SOJC also has many different activities they can do. We take advertising students on trips, we take them to visit advertising agencies, we get them to shadow people and experience what it’s like to be in the advertising environment.
We also have an internal student-run advertising agency: Allen Hall Advertising. The Ad Team has been extremely successful nationally and regionally. They work with national and international clients developing campaigns for real companies and real products.
There are also many student groups such as Rising that's focused on communication for sustainability. We also have Taking Up Space, which is a group of BIPOC students that are working in advertising. Every student here has a group that they can be part of that doesn't exist everywhere.
What are students passionate about when they come to the SOJC and major in advertising?
All kinds of people are part of the SOJC and the SOJC advertising program from all kinds of cultural backgrounds. The differences are what make advertising great. The differences and those people working together are what make things really sing and fly and touch the culture. There are people who look at certain parts of the culture and want to explore it more, and they want to understand what's next. That really helps develop communication that resonates with people on a deeper level. So it's all kinds of people.
How does the SOJC help advertising students find out what they really want to do?
A lot of students start here set on one thing, such as becoming a writer. We'll help them focus on what kind of writer. Do they want to write scripts? Do they want to write ad copy? We try to help them understand what it means to be a strategist, what it means to be in production, what it means to work in all the different parts of advertising. To do this we create a lot of opportunities for them to hear from people in the industry. We take them to businesses where they can shadow people in the industry and see what the experience is like working in advertising. They get to see there are some bad days as well as a lot of great days, but they understand that it's an industry, it's a job and it's a tremendous amount of fun.
What is forward-thinking advertising?
There are a lot of things that exist in culture that are niche that most people aren't paying attention to. By the time it gets to be big, it's too late. It's already happened. Everybody's done that. But what we're trying to do is teach students to be curious, how to ask questions, not give answers. They have to learn what to ask. Maybe you ask “why” five times before you actually get to the right answer. But the more curiosity they can develop, the more they start to see this is what is going to be a trend, this is what's going to catch on in the culture.
How does the SOJC teach brand responsibility?
You can have a very lucrative financial career in advertising, but it's equally, if not more important, to make a difference. And making that difference is something that permeates the culture of Allen Hall and the people who are in it.
The Advertising and Brand Responsibility Master’s program sprang from what was already happening in our undergraduate programs. We had been talking about making brands responsible for years, whether it's for the environment, whether it's for the economy, whether it's for people and your impact on them. We developed the master's program from that.
Every class that students are in studying advertising — and this is the largest program in the SOJC and one of the largest ones on the campus — a lot of students come here because they've been somewhere else on this campus, and they go, no, that's what I want to do. What they find is something that's very important in the culture now. We are exploring and teaching how can we be responsible to each other, to the environment, to society. So that permeates things here.