So, You Want to Work in Advertising and Public Relations? Don’t be a JAMS Major [OPINION]

Usually when a budding, and naïve, high school graduate knows what they want to be when they grow up, their educational path becomes pretty clear. Say they want to be doctor. That title requires a college education – a student will major in some type of science with a pre-med track. Or take a primary school teacher, which requires a student to major in early childhood education. You see where I’m going with this. If a student knows what they want to be, it’s pretty easy to look at a university’s list of majors and identify which track will supply them with the appropriate knowledge and encouragement to do so.

So, this is what I did. When my general education requirements were complete, I skipped into my advisor’s office and said “JAMS please” when asked what major I’d like pursue. It was so Cher Horowitz meets Elle woods. But it made sense at the time. Growing up, I loved writing. I wrote handwritten letters to my grandmother who lived one state away from me in Minnesota. Her responses were scrolled across the page in cursive like a beautiful maze that always led me to “never stop writing, darling – love grandma.” When I visited her each summer, she’d tell me the story of Margaret Fishback – an English and history teacher turned copywriter. She landed a job at Macys in their advertising department during the Great Depression and by 1932, she was the “highest-paid advertising woman in the world” according to New York magazine – a rare occurrence during this time (and, if we’re being real, now as well). A glance back at those letters during my senior year of high school confirmed my goal of becoming a copywriter just like Margaret Fishback. They also confirmed my support for the removal of cursive in k-12 education, but that’s beside the point.

Fast forward four years, and here I am sitting in one of my required, upper-level JAMS classes, Media and Society to be exact, learning about big data, strategies of media giants, and the age of mechanical reproduction. After reading one chapter of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, in which one discovers the real function of Disneyland and its advertising, I knew ad/PR was not for me. As Baudrillard states, “To begin with it [Disneyland] is a play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world” are presented to us as imaginary in order to make us believe that the lives we live are real. It’s the matrix within the matrix; create an elaborate, fake space so the “real” world feels real. Advertising and public relations thrives on society’s heavy dependence on the circulation of these false images.

Don’t get me wrong – majoring in JAMS saved my life as I know it. Gone is the girl who once believed that she could be happy working as a cog in corporate America as a public relations specialist. That girl would’ve stopped at nothing to land a high-paying job for the cost of her morality. She believed what she saw in the mass media because why would news coverage on social media platforms be false?

Unlike what the title of this piece may have led you to believe, pursuing a JAMS degree is one of the most valuable subjects you can study at UWM. But not because it teaches you how to be a wiz with copy. And sure, you won’t walk away knowing how to code JavaScript or design an architectural plan, but you will walk away informed about the history of American media and well-equipped to navigate the toxic sludge pile that is our current media landscape which is inflamed each and every minute by social media. Because contrary to popular belief, there are gems to be found. Those who believe that advertising and corporate publicity shouldn’t be cleverly disguised as journalistic coverage in the news, but rather utilized to inform consumers through transparent outlets are out there. Bless their hearts.

To be sure, an advertising and public relations student or professor might argue that it’s your intention that determines how you apply skills learned in the major. In other words, with the right moral compass and chipper attitude, you can change an industry rooted in decades of dishonesty and manipulation. Easy, breezy, beautiful, as they say. And no, Maybelline is not sponsoring this article. Upper level coursework like JAMS 524: Advertising and Public Relations Campaigns or JAMS 407: Persuasive Media Strategies and Tactics might technically prepare you for a career in the field, but what they don’t teach you is how to handle job functions that make you uncomfortable in your core.  

When you learn how to create a video news release (VNR), a video segment made to look like a news report, but is instead created by a PR firm, ad agency, or marketing firm and given to a news station to air, you may be struck with an ethical dilemma. Take this scenario: You know that the segment your boss asks you to create about the recent encouragement of milk consumption by a select group of doctors is actually a ploy by the dairy industry to boost milk sales. But what is one to do in this situation? Surely the advice given to you by your ad/PR professors to stand your moral ground, if you feel so obliged, and refuse to engage in that sort of diabolical treachery will play well in your favor. If your desire is to file for unemployment.  

As I reminisce back on those letters I wrote my grandma – God rest her soul (she’s not dead, just senile) – I think, do I want to use my skills and passion as a writer, one of the purest parts of myself, to manipulate others? No, I don’t. But for a paycheck? Tempting, as my reliance on fancy caffeinated beverages continues to drain my bank account, but I’ll pass. The moral high ground may not pay for my coffee addiction, or barely sustain my existence, but at least I can brag about how woke I am for not giving into the debauchery that is modern day advertising and public relations campaigns.