Three Ad professors teach First-Year Odyssey seminars

As part of the new First-year Odyssey Seminar Program, Drs. Reichert, Hamilton and Kreshel are teaching seminars focusing on different topics in Advertising. The new program, designed to introduce first-years to academic life at the University of Georgia, gives students the opportunity to engage with faculty and other freshmen in a small class environment.

Dr. Reichert is teaching a seminar entitled, "Sex in Advertising: History, Content, and Controversy." In this class students will learn anything and everything about sex in Advertising: What is it? Does it work? and Why is it used to appeal to young people? The class will also discuss some of the most controversial advertisements of all time from Calvin Klein to Victoria's Secret to Abercrombie & Fitch.

Dr. Hamilton's seminar, called "New Devices, Old Needs: The Cultural History of Communications Technologies," explores how essentially new communications technologies satisfy basic human needs that are quite old in comparison. The class will discuss many communications technologies, from the crop of Internet applications and social media back to radio, telegraph, photography, and further. Students will investigate these technologies and what people at the time had to say about them in order to explore relationships between communications and society.

Dr. Kreshel's seminar is called "Advertising and the Commercialization of Everyday Life." Students will learn some of the "basics" like what advertising is, advertising in the context of a "chaotic" media culture in which technological innovation accelerates the development of new media platforms, and how the concept of an "audience" is changing. They will also look at some of the controversies that arise in looking at advertising as a vehicle of social communication, focusing mostly upon how the logic of the marketplace has found its way into institutions and ideas never intended to be traded as marketing commodities.