Thursday, October 05, 2006

Careers In Advertising

Unlike in years before, nowadays, people looking for careers in advertising can actually major in marketing in college. Marketing is a major that differs sharply from the traditional liberal arts model of education. In the traditional model, the point of an education is to become a good citizen. You would take classes in a wide range of fields, to gain experties and knowledge in the way the mind, art, literature, and society in general work, and hopefully grow to be a good and ethical, as well as an educated member of society. For careers in advertising, marketing majors draw from all of these fields of human knowledge as well. It draws from psychology, statistics, literature, art, economics, history, and many other fields, but unlike a more traditional approach to education, the point of all of these fields is to develop a narrow set of career skills. You don't learn psychology generally, you learn some basic psychology and then how it applies to convincing people that they need what you are selling, for example. Nonetheless, the broad knowledge base that this draws from does insure you an education of sorts, and more importantly, it prepares you to experience life in the professional world. Many careers in advertising don't require this particular major, however, just as going into business does not require a business degree. Rather, careers in advertising draw from marketing majors, Psychology majors, English literature majors, art majors, and a wide variety of other fields to create a diverse pool of talent from which to draw to create a more effective marketing team. In advertising as in all things, a diversity of skills is always a powerful asset. With careers in advertising, it is important to know that that is what you really want to do before you start. You will be required to work quite long hours on extremely difficult projects, and initially the pay is far from stupendous. Eventually, however, if you persevere you will make the big bucks, but many people find out that careers in advertising are not the careers for them. Creative people flock to careers in advertising in droves, feeling that they will have the ability to use it as a way to get paid for getting creative, only to find out that the experience is actually very stifling to their imaginations, because their creativity is only chanelled towards making a profit. A career in advertising can be very rewarding if it is meant for you, but is not something to be taken lightly.

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