Tomorrow nearly 50 advertising, marketing and public relations undergraduates will present their dissertation research at CMC’s Fourth Annual Promotional Communications Conference at the Executive Business Centre.
The conference, expected to draw more than 100 delegates, will hear papers on a variety of topics from insights about how young people use the latest social media tools like Snapchat and Instagram to the representation of consumers in banking advertising to a feminist interpretation of the marketing of the latest Disney princesses. Additionally, students will hear from keynote speakers with more than 40 years of promotional communications industry experience – Chris Nurko, Global Chairman FutureBrand, and Stuart Armon, Practitioner in Residence at the Media School.
“The conference is a highlight of our academic year and something we look forward to because it is an opportunity to showcase our students’ work and connect them with some of our industry partners,” said Dr Richard Scullion, associate dean for the Media School’s Corporate and Marketing Communications (CMC) Academic Group, which runs the conference.
CMC, which offers undergraduate and postgraduate taught degrees in advertising, marketing communications, public relations, and politics and media, created the conference as an opportunity for students to choose to, in addition to the written dissertation, present their research to colleagues on their course, academics and guests from the advertising, marketing and public relations industries. This year it will also welcome proud mums and dads for the day.
CMC also launched the Journal of Promotional Communications last year with the top papers from the 2013 event. The journal is an open-access, online journal that, since the first edition, accepts submissions from undergraduates and postgraduates from BU and beyond. Research published there can come from a variety of disciplines, such as marketing, advertising, PR theory, consumer culture and behaviour, political communications, media studies, sociology, cultural studies, and management.
Again this year, the top papers from the 2014 Promotional Communications conference will be published in the journal.
The students presenting at the conference are among the more than 200 final-year students in CMC who have worked for months on their individual research projects. CMC students can choose to write a traditional dissertation of 10,000 words or write a research paper in the style of an 8,000-word journal article and deliver a 20-minute paper at the student conference.
Dr Janice Denegri-Knott, Dr Carrie Hodges, Dr Dan Jackson, Dr Richard Scullion and Dr Shelley Thompson organize the conference.