ADV4802 Advertising Campaigns - Curriculum Guide

Course Description

ADV4802 is the campaigns capstone. The statewide description says so directly: "capstone experience for advertising and PR majors. Prepare integrated communication campaign including: research, strategy, design, copy, presentation to client."

That sentence describes the standard shape of the course. Students work in agency teams for a term on a single client — real or simulated — and produce a complete campaign: situation analysis and research, a strategic brief, creative concepts and executions, a media plan with budget, and a formal pitch. It is usually the last course in the major and the one that produces the portfolio piece a graduate actually interviews with.

One Florida public institution carries it: the University of West Florida, at 3 credits, titled Advertising Campaigns. This guide is written as a single-institution guide and hedges accordingly.

⚠⚠ It is a capstone for BOTH advertising and public relations majors — which is the key fact

The statewide description says "advertising and PR majors", and the one private institution carrying the number titles it Advertising and Public Relations Capstone. ⚠ So this is a shared capstone, not an advertising-only course, and that shapes it in ways worth knowing before you enrol:

• The deliverable is an INTEGRATED communication campaign — paid, earned, shared and owned channels together — rather than an advertising campaign with public relations bolted on. That reflects how the industry actually works now.
• ⚠ Your team will contain people trained differently from you. Advertising students generally arrive stronger on creative concepting and media strategy; public relations students on research, writing, earned media and stakeholder analysis. The teams that do well treat that as the point rather than as friction.
• ⚠ It means the course cannot assume deep specialist preparation in either discipline, so if you want to go deep on media buying or on crisis communication specifically, that is a different course.

⚠⚠ Three campaigns numbers exist, and this catalogue has met the confusion from the other side

Number	Statewide title	Statewide description
ADV4800	Advertising Campaigns	"coordination of copywriting, media strategy, and production for the total product campaign"
ADV4801	Advertising Campaigns II	"continuation... plans book, finished creative and presentation development"
ADV4802	Advertising Campaign Strategies	this course — the integrated capstone for advertising and PR

⚠⚠ And there is a matching problem on the public relations side of the same subject. This catalogue has previously recorded that UWF uses PUR4801 for a campaigns capstone that the state numbers PUR4800C, while statewide PUR4801 is Public Relations Cases — a different subject. So the campaigns capstone in Florida is spread across at least five numbers in two prefixes, and at least one institution files it somewhere the state does not.

What that means for you, practically:

• Do not identify this course by number when you transfer or when you apply to a graduate programme. Identify it by what you produced.
• ⚠ Check your own degree audit against the specific number your programme requires — the three ADV numbers are not interchangeable in a requirements check even though they describe overlapping work.
• The portfolio is the real credential in this field anyway. A plans book and a recorded pitch outweigh a transcript line at every agency interview.

⚠ A data note: the statewide prerequisite for this number is recorded as "ADV U101C", which is not a valid SCNS course identifier. It is a corrupted entry. Treat the statewide prerequisite field as unusable for this course and read your own catalog — the real prerequisites are described below.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Conduct situation analysis and campaign research: secondary research, competitive and category analysis, audience research, and primary research where the term allows — survey, focus group or interview.
• Define a target audience with evidence rather than assumption, and build a usable audience profile including media behaviour.
• Write a strategic brief: the business problem, the communication objective, the single-minded proposition, support, tone, and mandatories. ⚠ The brief is the hinge of the whole course — a weak brief produces creative work that cannot be judged.
• Set measurable objectives distinguishing business outcomes from communication outcomes, with baselines and targets, and specify how each will be measured.
• Develop creative concepts and produce executions across media — copy, layout, script, social content — at a standard good enough to present.
• Build a media plan with reach, frequency, flighting, rationale and a budget that adds up, including paid, earned, shared and owned elements.
• Integrate public relations into the plan properly — earned media strategy, media relations materials, influencer and partnership approaches, and stakeholder communication.
• Produce a professional plans book: written, designed, internally consistent, and defensible on every page.
• Deliver a formal client pitch and defend the work under questioning.
• Work effectively in an agency-style team — define roles, hold deadlines, give and take creative criticism, and resolve disagreement without losing the schedule.
• Apply legal and ethical standards: FTC truth-in-advertising rules and substantiation, endorsement and disclosure requirements, copyright and rights clearance, privacy, and the professional codes.

Optional Outcomes

• Compete in the AAF National Student Advertising Competition where the section is built around it.
• Work with a live external client and deliver to them.
• Build and run a real digital campaign with actual spend and reporting.
• Produce broadcast or video work to a finished standard.
• Develop analytics dashboards and a post-campaign measurement report.
• Produce campaign work in Spanish or for a bilingual audience — ⚠ genuinely valuable in the Florida market.
• Develop a crisis communication annex to the campaign plan.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• The campaign planning process end to end.
• Research methods for campaigns; using syndicated data.
• Segmentation, targeting and positioning.
• The creative brief and account planning.
• Objectives, strategy and tactics — and keeping them distinct.
• Creative development, concepting and execution.
• Media planning, buying and budgeting.
• Digital, social, search and influencer channels.
• Public relations and earned media within an integrated plan.
• Measurement, analytics and campaign evaluation.
• The plans book: structure, writing and design.
• Pitching and presentation skills.
• Agency structure, roles and client relationships.
• Advertising law, FTC regulation and professional ethics.

Optional Topics

• Multicultural and multilingual campaign development.
• Non-profit and public service campaigns.
• Political campaign communication.
• Brand strategy and brand architecture.
• Experiential and event marketing.
• Programmatic buying and ad technology.
• Campaign work under privacy regulation and cookie deprecation.

Florida-Specific Content

• ⚠⚠ Multicultural and Spanish-language campaign work is a genuine Florida competitive advantage. Miami is a centre of Hispanic-market advertising for the entire United States and for Latin America, and several agencies there produce work for the whole hemisphere. A graduate who can concept and write in Spanish, or who understands Hispanic-market strategy properly rather than as translated general-market work, has a real edge in this state. ⚠ The professional distinction to learn: transcreation is not translation, and a campaign that has merely been translated is usually visibly so.
• Florida's advertising market is concentrated but real — Miami and Fort Lauderdale (international and Hispanic-market work), Tampa/St. Petersburg (a substantial agency cluster), Orlando (tourism, hospitality and themed entertainment), and Jacksonville (financial services and logistics clients).
• The dominant client categories are Florida-specific and worth knowing: tourism and hospitality, cruise lines, theme parks and attractions, healthcare systems, real estate and homebuilding, higher education, and legal services. ⚠ Tourism destination marketing is unusually important here — Visit Florida and the county tourist development councils are significant advertisers, funded by tourist development tax, which makes them public-accountable clients with distinctive constraints.
• Regulated categories you will likely meet: healthcare advertising, legal advertising (⚠ The Florida Bar regulates attorney advertising specifically and requires review of many advertisements — a real constraint on a large Florida client category), real estate, and financial services.
• Hurricane season affects campaign flighting for Florida clients — media plans and creative calendars routinely carry contingency provisions, and a plan that ignores it looks naive to a Florida reviewer.
• Professional bodies: American Advertising Federation chapters across the state run the ADDY awards (student categories included — enter), and the Florida Public Relations Association and PRSA chapters serve the PR side. ⚠ The AAF's National Student Advertising Competition has an active Florida district, and where a section is built around it the course becomes a competition team — which is demanding and is the single best line a new graduate can have on a résumé in this field.

Resources & Tools

• Advertising Campaign Planning (Parente and Strausbaugh-Hutchinson) — the standard campaigns text.
• Strategic Advertising Campaigns (Schultz) and Advertising Campaign Strategy (Drewniany and Jewler) for alternatives; Hitting the Sweet Spot (Fortini-Campbell) on account planning and audience insight.
• Research and data: Mintel, Statista, Simmons or MRI-Simmons and Nielsen where your library subscribes; the US Census and American Community Survey for audience demographics (free, and under-used by students); Google Trends; Meta and Google ad planning tools.
• Production: Adobe Creative Cloud (InDesign for the plans book, Photoshop and Illustrator for executions, Premiere for video); Canva and Figma for rapid concepting.
• Project management: Trello, Asana or a shared board — ⚠ use one. Team capstones fail on coordination far more often than on ideas.
• Industry press and work: Adweek, Ad Age, PRWeek, the Effie Awards case library (⚠ the best free resource in this course — real campaigns with the strategy and the results documented), the One Club and D&AD archives, and Cannes Lions case studies.
• Legal and ethical references: the FTC's advertising guidance including the Endorsement Guides, the AAF and PRSA codes, and The Florida Bar's advertising rules where a legal client is involved.
• Certifications worth holding as a student: Google Ads, Google Analytics and Meta Blueprint are free and signal seriousness at entry level.

Career Pathways

• Account coordinator / account executive (SOC 13-1161, 11-2011) — the common agency entry route.
• Account planner / strategist (SOC 13-1161) — the role this course's brief-writing work most directly resembles.
• Media planner / buyer (SOC 13-1161, 41-3011).
• Copywriter and art director (SOC 27-3043, 27-1011) — ⚠ portfolio-gated: agencies hire creatives on the book, and this course should produce the first pieces in it.
• Public relations specialist (SOC 27-3031).
• Social media manager / content strategist (SOC 27-3031, 13-1161).
• Digital marketing and paid media specialist (SOC 13-1161).
• Brand or marketing coordinator, client-side (SOC 13-1161) — often better hours and pay than agency at entry, with less creative range.
• Marketing analytics (SOC 13-1161, 15-2041) — growing fast, and rewards the measurement half of this course.
• Non-profit and public health communication (SOC 27-3031).

⚠ Honest note on entry. Agency entry pay is modest and the hours around a pitch are long. The three things that actually get a graduate hired are the portfolio, an internship, and someone willing to vouch for them — and this course is the most efficient source of the first. Finish the plans book to a standard you would show a stranger, record the pitch, and keep both.

Special Information

Prerequisites narrative

⚠ The statewide prerequisite field is corrupted ("ADV U101C" is not a valid course identifier), so it cannot be relied on. In practice a capstone of this kind sits at the end of the major and expects the sequence before it: an introduction to advertising or public relations, copywriting, media planning, research methods, and usually a design or production course. UWF's catalog is the authority; read it, and expect senior standing and major status to be required.

⚠⚠ The real prerequisite is scheduling, and students underestimate it. A campaigns capstone is team-based with immovable deadlines and a live presentation date. Do not take it in a term when you are also carrying two other project courses, and do not take it in a compressed summer session if you can avoid it. Agree meeting times with your team in week one, because the scheduling conflict you discover in week nine is the one that damages the work.

Credits and contact hours

UWF offers this course at 3 semester credits. No Florida institution publishes a contact-hour figure; the 45 hours stated here is the Florida convention for a 3-credit lecture course and is derived rather than published.

⚠⚠ That figure substantially understates a campaigns capstone, and this is the most practically important sentence in this section. Team meetings, research, production and pitch rehearsal run well beyond scheduled class time, and the final three weeks are heavy. Budget ten to fifteen hours a week and expect the end of term to be worse than the middle.

⚠ One public carrier

UWF is the only Florida public institution offering ADV4802; the `ADV` prefix is otherwise fragmented (109 of its 133 live identifiers are carried by exactly one school). The one other Florida carrier is private and outside this catalogue's scope — though its title, Advertising and Public Relations Capstone, usefully confirms the shared-capstone reading.

⚠ Transfer: SCNS guarantees transfer to an institution offering the same course, and essentially none does. Expect elective credit. For a capstone this matters less than usual — a receiving programme will normally want you to complete its own capstone regardless, since the point is the supervised team project, not the credit hours.

Dual enrolment and high school credit

SCNS marks this number available for dual enrolment with elective high school credit. ⚠ All 110 active `ADV` numbers carry the identical marking, so it is a prefix-level default with no information about this course; a senior capstone is not a realistic dual-enrolment option.

Course format and assessment

Team-based project work with a plans book and a formal pitch as the major deliverables, usually with peer evaluation contributing to the individual grade. ⚠ Peer evaluation is not a formality in this course — it exists because team free-riding is the characteristic failure mode, and it is usually weighted enough to matter.

Position in the curriculum

The final course in the advertising or public relations major, taken in the last year. It is the course that converts the rest of the degree into something demonstrable.

AI Integration

⚠⚠ Advertising is among the most AI-disrupted fields in this catalogue, and a capstone taught today has to address it directly — including the uncomfortable part, which is that some of the entry-level production work graduates used to be hired for is being automated.

Where the tools are genuinely useful, and where the industry actually uses them: rapid concept generation and volume ideation; first-draft copy variants for testing; mood boards, storyboards and comps for internal discussion; synthesising research and summarising competitor activity; audience segment hypotheses to be verified against real data; media mix modelling and bid optimisation; and dynamic creative optimisation at scale.

Where they fail:

• ⚠⚠ The strategic insight is the part that cannot be generated, and it is the part this course grades. A model produces competent, average, derivative work — it is optimised toward the probable, and advertising that works is generally the opposite of the probable. Ask for a campaign idea and you get the idea everyone else in the room also got.
• Statistics, market data and citations are fabricated. Market sizes, share figures and survey results are exactly what models invent. Every number in a plans book must have a real source — a client who catches an invented figure in a pitch stops listening to the rest.
• Local and cultural specificity is weak, which matters here: Hispanic-market work, regional Florida nuance and community-level insight are precisely where generic output fails and where the Florida market rewards genuine knowledge.
• ⚠⚠ Rights and disclosure are real legal exposure. AI-generated imagery raises unsettled questions about training data and copyright; generated likenesses and voices raise right-of-publicity problems; and the FTC requires that endorsements and material connections be disclosed, which extends to synthetic testimonials and AI-generated "reviews." A fabricated testimonial is a deceptive practice regardless of how it was produced. Several clients and agencies now require disclosure of AI use in delivered work — ask before you use it on a live client.
• Industry positions differ and are changing. Some agencies encourage these tools openly; some clients prohibit them contractually. ⚠ Ask, rather than assume, on any live client project.

Academic integrity. Follow your institution's policy and your instructor's, and disclose AI use where required. ⚠ The specific caution for a capstone: the portfolio is the point. A plans book assembled largely from generated work is a portfolio piece you cannot defend in an interview — and you will be asked, in detail, how you arrived at the strategy. Build something you can talk about for twenty minutes.