What is the difference between a Marketing and Advertising major?

Question

They seem to be essentally the same thing to me... but obviously they are not. So, what are the differences?

What are the career options after college with either of these majors?

Specific answers please... will always pick a best answer!

Answer 1

You are right in assuming they are different. First of all, advertising is a subset of marketing, which involves a general focus on the customer's needs. So marketing will cover product development, pricing, and distribution, along with promotion, which is the area into which advertising, along with personal selling, public relations, and sales promotion fit. There is also much more likely to be a focus on market research and strategy, and since most marketing programs are part of business schools, there is an effort to fit marketing into general business strategy.

Advertising programs, on the other hand, often originate in journalism or communications schools. They tend to focus much more on the creative side of artwork, copywriting, etc., along with media buying.

The types of jobs you might be looking at coming from the two sides might also be different. Marketing majors can go into a broad variety of business jobs, but if they choose to go into advertising agencies, the most common route is as account executives, whose job is to mediate between the client and the creative people in the agent - they get the client to clarify what they need from their advertising, and make sure that this is what the creative people are providing, rather than just having them come up with something "artistic, but meaningless". A second possiblity for a marketing major is as a traffic manager, who basically expedites the various processes in the agency to meet the needs of the client. Those coming from advertising departments are more likely to go into the creative or media buying functions. Creative is obvious, but media buying involves taking the client's budget and trying to get the greatest bang for the buck from it - one could presumably do this coming from a marketing school too, but it doesn't seem to appeal to many marketing majors, for some reason.

Answer 2

Marketing deals with more of how you sell the product, the financial aspect and how well it's being received. It has alot to do with math and the progress of the business. Jobs would include in different businesses, retail perhaps.

Advertising deals with the visuals that attract a conumer to the product. It also incorporates some math, and there is more creativity involved. The jobs would obviously be in advertising agencies, magazines and so forth making ads.

Overall though, they are pretty much alike.