Creative Advertising with Foundation Year
Entry requirements
UCAS Tariff
A typical offer will require a UCAS Tariff score between 32 - 56. Every application is considered on an individual basis. For further details of our international English entry requirements, please visit our General Entry Requirements pages.
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Attend an interview
About this course
This course is offered as a four-year programme, including an initial Foundation Year. The Foundation Year will allow you to develop your academic study skills and build confidence in your abilities, identifying your own strengths and development needs for progression onto an undergraduate programme.
**Why study at Buckinghamshire New University?**
Why does this little part of England produce so many heavyweight creative superstars? Is it the great facilities, a course that perfectly mixes practical skills, creative challenges and marketing insights, taught by tutors with decades of advertising experience? Is it the army of alumni students, the BNU Mafia as they are affectionately known as, who constantly return to give tutorials, workshops, mentoring, advice, placements, internships and jobs? Is it its location, only 40 minutes from the hustle and bustle of one of the worlds’ most exciting adland communities, London?
Who knows, but for the last 25 years its students have constantly created great campaigns that have won awards, who’ve then gone on to create the next generation of advertising history, both at home and aboard.
Opportunity modules are a key part of the BNU curriculum. You’ll choose modules in your first year from a broad selection in areas such as sustainability, entrepreneurship, creativity, digital skills, personal growth, civic engagement, health & wellbeing and employment. Opportunity modules are designed to enable you to develop outside the traditional boundaries of your discipline and help you to further stand out from the crowd to future employers.
The course sets about developing you as individuals, helping you to think in different ways and voice your opinions for effect.
Above all you will develop as a creative thinker and problem solver. To aid your development you will learn practical skills and experience both digital and traditional processes and technologies. These range from Adobe Creative Suite to letterpress and silkscreen printing. Photography and film making are integral to most things we do.
You will learn to apply creative problem-solving to create targeted and innovative communications and solutions to a diversity of briefs. You will gain a better understanding of people and gain insights into how they think, behave and act.
Students are also encouraged to get involved with industry awards, including D&AD New Blood Awards and Young Creative Network Awards. All this adds to the employability of our students. In 2022 our students won two D&AD New Blood Pencils and 2023 saw our students bring home four.
**What will I study?**
On this creative advertising course, we have a reputation for nurturing creative individuals able to think on their feet and adapt to an industry in a constant state of change. You’ll join a community of intuitive thinkers who look at everything, challenge boundaries and invent innovative and engaging solutions to advertising problems.
We’ll encourage you to experiment and push your ideas and concepts and gain in confidence when taking risks. You'll have every opportunity to improve your skills and not worry about getting things wrong. Making mistakes is an important part of the creative process.
You’ll only be taught by agency professionals both as dedicated tutors and visiting guests. They will help develop you as individuals, helping you think in different ways and voice your opinions for effect. You will gain a better understanding of people and gain insights into how they think, behave and act, through creative and strategic workshops, real live briefs, inspirational talks, agency visits, work experience and major competitions.
You will learn to apply creative problem-solving to create targeted and innovative communications and solutions to a diversity of briefs. Above all you will be able to create engaging and compelling campaigns.
Modules
**Foundation year**
Preparing for Success: Knowledge and Creativity
Preparing for Success: Self-development and Responsibility
Inquiry Based Learning
Photography, Design and Visual Communication
**Year one**
**Core Modules**
Creative Skills: Creation and Execution
Advertising Pitch
Advertising Agency
Conceptual Thinking
Critical and Historical Thinking
**Opportunity Modules**
2 x 10 credit year one Opportunity modules.
**Year two**
**Core Modules**
Advertising Communication Skills
Digital Advertising & Content Creation
Enterprise
Industry Brief
Design Research and Theory
**Year three**
**Core Modules**
Final Major Project
Agency Competition
Agency Briefs
Dissertation
Research and Development
Assessment methods
How will I be taught and assessed?
The Creative Advertising degree is widely recognised by the sector with a reputation built up over twenty-five years collaborating with agencies, it is a successful collaboration between education and industry, and staff are always creating new opportunities for students to engage with the best creatives and strategists. These include live briefs, agency visits, crits, industry-focused modules and work experience in the second and third years.
Being in agencies on a regular basis, getting your work noticed and your voice heard is by far the best way to land your ideal job in advertising. This successful collaboration between education and industry ensures you as a BNU student, gets to engage with the best creatives and strategists.
Some of the best ideas come from people who push the boundaries. Our critique sessions prepare you for the challenges of the agency world - how to pitch and how to deal with knock backs. For this reason, from year one, you will be in agencies presenting your ideas to creatives and strategists.
Collaboration is key and throughout your three years you will get the opportunity to work with students from across the university. If you need a film maker, the Film & TV course has a rich supply. If you need help making your ideas look great, our Graphic Design students will help bring your concepts to life.
After graduating, many of our former students stay involved, sometimes running workshops to help give you an insight into the industry. Some of our graduates are now Creative Directors at Saatchi & Saatchi, BBH, VCCP, Mother, TBWA and Droga5. This is a hugely supportive network of past students always willing to help BNU students.
Tuition fees
Select where you currently live to see what you'll pay:
Extra funding
Buckinghamshire New University offers a range of bursaries and scholarships. For more information, please visit https://www.bucks.ac.uk/study/fees-and-funding/financial-support-bursaries-and-scholarships
The Uni
Buckinghamshire New University
School of Art, Design, and Performance
What students say
We've crunched the numbers to see if overall student satisfaction here is high, medium or low compared to students studying this subject(s) at other universities.
How do students rate their degree experience?
The stats below relate to the general subject area/s at this university, not this specific course. We show this where there isn’t enough data about the course, or where this is the most detailed info available to us.
Marketing
Teaching and learning
Assessment and feedback
Resources and organisation
Student voice
Who studies this subject and how do they get on?
Most popular A-Levels studied (and grade achieved)
After graduation
The stats in this section relate to the general subject area/s at this university – not this specific course. We show this where there isn't enough data about the course, or where this is the most detailed info available to us.
Marketing
What are graduates doing after six months?
This is what graduates told us they were doing (and earning), shortly after completing their course. We've crunched the numbers to show you if these immediate prospects are high, medium or low, compared to those studying this subject/s at other universities.
Top job areas of graduates
Want to join a fast-moving, diverse industry that's at the cutting edge of tech? Try marketing! A lot of the jobs are in London, but graduates don't just go to work in advertising agencies — all sorts of industries do their own marketing these days, and with the rise of digital and mobile technology, a lot of marketing is done in quite innovative ways using a wide range of methods. Common industries (apart from advertising and PR) include recruitment, online retail, higher education, banking and IT. A lot of jobs in this industry are handled through recruitment agencies, so if you get in touch with them early, that might give you a headstart for some of the jobs available. But be careful — unpaid working is not the norm in the marketing industry, but it is more common than in most sectors.
What about your long term prospects?
Looking further ahead, below is a rough guide for what graduates went on to earn.
Marketing
The graph shows median earnings of graduates who achieved a degree in this subject area one, three and five years after graduating from here.
£19k
£24k
£26k
Note: this data only looks at employees (and not those who are self-employed or also studying) and covers a broad sample of graduates and the various paths they've taken, which might not always be a direct result of their degree.
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Post-six month graduation stats:
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It offers a snapshot of what grads went on to do six months later, what they were earning on average, and whether they felt their degree helped them obtain a 'graduate role'. We calculate a mean rating to indicate if this is high, medium or low compared to other universities.
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Graduate field commentary:
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The Longitudinal Educational Outcomes dataset combines HRMC earnings data with student records from the Higher Education Statistics Agency.
While there are lots of factors at play when it comes to your future earnings, use this as a rough timeline of what graduates in this subject area were earning on average one, three and five years later. Can you see a steady increase in salary, or did grads need some experience under their belt before seeing a nice bump up in their pay packet?
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