The Hub for Brand Innovation and Advertising Technology is hosting a virtual summer academy this July called the “Frontiers of Digital Advertising,” focusing on data analytics and digital advertising.

The program started on July 9 and will run through until July 30 for a total of four weeks. Participants will also have the opportunity to receive a certificate and digital badge from the University’s advertising department if they complete the entire program. 

The program has partnered with name-brand industries such as Amazon Advertising, Amobee, Google and Tobii to educate participants about these topics.

“It’s a four-part series of workshops where we focus on strategic brand communication and innovation in advertising technology, and for this particular Academy, we’re going to be focusing on four different topics,” said Susan Muirhead, visiting associate director of the Hub.

The four topics planned for the program are called Attention Economy, which is partnered with Google, Neuromarketing partnered with Tobii Pro, Programmatic Advertising partnered with Amobee and Brand Strategy in the Modern Marketplace partnered with Amazon Advertising.

Various workshops and presentations are taking place in the program to better understand each topic at hand. Activities range from presentations given by industry experts to hands-on exercises that participants will take part in.

“In the second session, we’ll be getting a demo of Tobii’s latest technologies and eye-tracking devices, and then we’ll be putting that into an exercise,” Muirhead said. “The participants will get to be basically in the head of a consumer and see how the eye tracking device works. We can see what their eyes are attracted to and perhaps why they make some of their purchases.”

The Brand Hub hopes that this program can enrich participants’ learning and aid them in their future professional endeavours by exposing them to industry experts and creating a network with potential collaborators.

“I think that the academy could actually help us learn more about the rising innovations in ad tech,” said Justyne Go, senior in Media. “As part of my classes, we briefly touched on what’s going on in the advertising world in terms of data analytics and ad tech, but with this program, it gives us the potential to learn more than what we can learn in a classroom setting.”

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