The MA Promotional Media explores the impact of digital platformisation and automation on promotional professions, skills and techniques

You will explore the convergence between public relations, advertising, and marketing roles, as well as hybridised fields such as digital marketing, social media management and UX/UI design. This MA isn’t about studying ads or press coverage, but about becoming a professional who can cross-examine and critique the power dynamics between promotional professions, their client-organisations and today’s platformised media landscape.

At its core, this masters looks at how you can better serve society by improving communications across the promotional disciplines, and how public relations (PR), advertising, and marketing professionals can best develop within a challenging digital world. You’ll learn how to reflect on contemporary intellectual theories – including digital media studies, sociology, feminist theory and algorithmic culture – and apply them to workplace realities so you plan the next decade of your career.

The questions we explore

• We want you to understand the existing power struggles between traditional and emerging promotional professions, therefore, this programme will look at public relations, advertising, and marketing as inter-related disciplines, drawing on theoretical and professional debates around industry issues as they happen.
• You will explore, for example, the implications of digital platformisation on the increasingly data-driven nature of promotional work, including the use of Artificial Intelligence and automation, among other topics.
• You’ll also examine current industry expectations and trends, and look at the crossovers between digital skills, creativity, management, and strategy.

The processes we use

• This is a theory-based programme, but you’ll have many practice-based options in subjects from different departments; from online news reporting and social media campaigning, to film making fundamentals or design methods, to consumer behaviour or marketing strategy.
• You'll also get the latest insights from industry professionals across PR, advertising and, marketing through our visiting speaker series. Recent industry guests have discussed: earned vs paid media, transmedia storytelling, programmatic advertising, SEO analytics, and social media community management.
• We periodically host public seminars such as Critical Perspectives on Promotional Cultures, with prestigious academic speakers from around the UK.
• You will also be encouraged to attend the Department’s Media Forum, which covers everything from Why Local Journalism Matters, to Reporting Africa.

The approach we take

• Note that this isn’t a business studies-style MA. It’s a rigorous, academic programme, which investigates promotional workers, their workplace experiences, and their use of media in today’s campaigns and debates.
• Our compulsory modules apply fields such as sociology, anthropology, feminist studies, digital media and digital cultural studies to public relations, advertising and marketing, exploring how these and other promotional professions work together, where they overlap, and where the tensions lie.
• You also have the freedom to choose optional modules from across theory and practice in different departments.

Careers

Our students acquire general transferable skills, including critical thinking, pattern recognition, research skills, and career management.

Specific transferable skills for the promotional industries include: message framing; storytelling and narrative construction; segmentation, measurement and evaluation; professional ethics and regulatory standards.