Advertising students benefit from Exterion Media partnership

Students from the new Advertising Master’s course were set a brief and given the task of presenting to a team of four from the UK-based advertising company as a part of their course work.

The Exterion team has been working with Bournemouth University (BU) lecturer Don Parker to create a brief that would challenge students to think strategically and creatively about outdoor advertising.

Paul Cranwell, Business Director at Exterion Media said, “We set a brief and they had to go away, research and come back to present their strategy to us. It’s about going through the process of defining a market and coming up with a strategy. We’ve been as constructive as possible for them because it counts towards their grade.

“It’s been brilliant to see some of the projects and actually quite a rewarding process for us too.”

Nicola Barrett, a Research Manager at Exterion, agreed with Paul on the quality of the work being produced by the BU Master’s students, “It was fantastic to see presentations where students have understood the audience and worked really well on our briefs to create something special.”

The students were not the only ones to benefit from the day-long presentation event, as student feedback also helped Exterion Media learn about their product and communication too.

Paul Cranwell continued, “We were looking for a university to work more closely with, to feed each other with things that we both need. We need research, good feedback and support and someone we can talk to about finding research that we can take to the market. Essentially, we need a relationship to build things together, a growing relationship.

“Next month we have a team of students [from Bournemouth University] coming over to join us.  It gives experience to students in the media world and we want to engage with these people, these students, now.”

Rebecca Rainer was one of the students presenting to Exterion Media on the day. She said, "Working with Exterion was a really good experience. After receiving the brief in October personally from Paul Cranwell at Exterion Media we were working on the project to show our first ideas to our tutor by November. Paul gave us detailed and helpful feedback, which is not always the case when you work with a real client in a university setting. He was very keen on making us learn something and people really appreciated that.

"Doing the final presentation in January was a very 'real' experience as we were presenting in front of five people from Exterion - but again, we got very constructive feedback and tips for further presentations. To my mind, the Exterion project was a very useful preparation for working in the advertising industry and also made us build good contacts for the future with an important company."

Don Parker, a Senior Lecturer in Marketing Communications at BU and one of the course leaders said, “This has been a really great day for the new MA Advertising course and this project is the first time Bournemouth University have worked with Exterion. If they think it’s been successful this will be a great platform, the beginning of an ongoing relationship that displays BU’s principle of Fusion.”

Paul Cranwell concluded, “Our industry needs fresh thinking. It’s a brave new world. We gave the students an open brief and it’s been great to see some real talent coming through these students. As an exercise it’s been really brilliant working with BU.”