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#TLCwebinar Reworking The Big Agency as an interactive employability unit #bigag16

Wednesday 10th of May April 2017 12:30-13:30 (UK Time) *Moved from 26th April, as browser issues in universities

Find The Big Agency: Blog : Twitter : Facebook

The Big Agency is a second year university unit at Manchester Metropolitan University that I’ve been reworking to meet the following description:

Creative agencies today are not just looking for creativity; they’re looking for employability. In the agency world, skills such as communication, team working, client relationship building, strategic thinking, project management and customer-centric research, all play an important role in understanding and answering the client brief.

The Big Agency unit will give you the chance to work on a brief provided by one of our industry partners, pitching for the client you want to work on. It will help you build your practical agency skills through a range of account management, research and creative-related tasks, whilst helping you develop your personal skills through the process of self-reflection and personal development planning. Big Agency will help bring to life theories, concepts and models of PR, marketing, branding, advertising and self-development and show how you can apply them.

This unit is assessed on an evidence-based portfolio of work to demonstrate your approach and response to a client’s creative brief and your own personal development: a) in the form of an end-of-year video documenting your work, and b) in the form of self-reflective essays and blogs evaluating your personal and professional goals and achievements.

With great help from my teaching team this year – it’s largely working, although there are more tweaks to be made, and feedback from students has been both encouraging, and the negative feedback has largely been things we had already picked up on this year. It’ll be a fairly informal discussion talking through how The Big Agency worked last year (with lectures/seminars), to a more employability focused unit drawing upon real life projects, and as we seek to encourage students to think creatively for themselves, have the courage of their convictions for some, and face the realities of working life for others.

You’ll be able to check out the webinar here… Slidedeck: http://bit.ly/MMUBigAg17

By admin

Dr Bex Lewis is passionate about helping people engage with the digital world in a positive way, where she has more than 20 years’ experience. She is Senior Lecturer in Digital Marketing at Manchester Metropolitan University and Visiting Research Fellow at St John’s College, Durham University, with a particular interest in digital culture, persuasion and attitudinal change, especially how this affects the third sector, including faith organisations, and, after her breast cancer diagnosis in 2017, has started to research social media and cancer. Trained as a mass communications historian, she has written the original history of the poster Keep Calm and Carry On: The Truth Behind the Poster (Imperial War Museum, 2017), drawing upon her PhD research. She is Director of social media consultancy Digital Fingerprint, and author of Raising Children in a Digital Age: Enjoying the Best, Avoiding the Worst  (Lion Hudson, 2014; second edition in process) as well as a number of book chapters, and regularly judges digital awards. She has a strong media presence, with her expertise featured in a wide range of publications and programmes, including national, international and specialist TV, radio and press, and can be found all over social media, typically as @drbexl.

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