Advertising programs, on the other hand, often originate in journalism or communications schools. They tend to focus much more on the creative side of artwork, copywriting, etc., along with media buying.

The types of jobs you might be looking at coming from the two sides might also be different. Marketing majors can go into a broad variety of business jobs, but if they choose to go into advertising agencies, the most common route is as account executives, whose job is to mediate between the client and the creative people in the agent – they get the client to clarify what they need from their advertising, and make sure that this is what the creative people are providing, rather than just having them come up with something “artistic, but meaningless”. A second possiblity for a marketing major is as a traffic manager, who basically expedites the various processes in the agency to meet the needs of the client. Those coming from advertising departments are more likely to go into the creative or media buying functions. Creative is obvious, but media buying involves taking the client’s budget and trying to get the greatest bang for the buck from it – one could presumably do this coming from a marketing school too, but it doesn’t seem to appeal to many marketing majors, for some reason.

Advertising deals with the visuals that attract a conumer to the product. It also incorporates some math, and there is more creativity involved. The jobs would obviously be in advertising agencies, magazines and so forth making ads.

Overall though, they are pretty much alike.