Visuals have their place in advertising classes.  The problem is visual gets way more than its share of focus in these classes as compared to the need to emotionally persuade by words.  There’s a great one word argument against the focus on the visual in advertising.

Google.

The search giant’s revenue has been made up nearly entirely by search based advertising.  You know, if you have used the internet for any period of time, Google’s ads are text.  Words.  Nothing pretty, nothing cute.  Just great persuasive words.  With 25 words or less, you must convince a prospect who is interested in your product to click for more information.  No pretty people.  Even using all caps is not allowed in Google advertising.  It is the art of verbal persuasion that makes Google a portion of the billions of dollars in revenue it generates.

If you are interested in advertising classes be prepared to challenge all the instructors point of view. This field is all about opinion, and very little about facts.  The idea of advertising is to evoke an emotional response in a prospect in order to get them to take action.  You can accomplish this visually.  Visuals mean different things to different people.  Costs of producing video or photo shoots can be prohibitive.  Sometimes the visual effort simply doesn’t work.

Think back on your own experience for a moment.  When is the last time you could not remember the client for an ad?  If you can’t remember specifically who the client was, the advertising was a failure.  Advertising classes won’t help you avoid the failures, and they will teach you certain effects in the visual realm.  Putting this effort into persuasive and memorable copy would be a better use of time in these classes.

I’m a proponent of renaming advertising classes into what they really are.  Art classes.  They focus on using visual arts to attempt to persuade.  One other example of why this is true.  How many viral marketing campaigns work?  How many are attempted?  What do you think the percentage of success of these campaigns are?

Viral marketing is visual at its heart.  The massive numbers of failure to “go viral” tells you why consistent verbal persuasion is a more important advertising effort and why advertising classes would be better for students if more focus was placed on verbal skills.