The Advertising industry is probably the best known of the three. Advertising is the exercise of promoting a company and its products or services through paid channels - so basically, paying to promote.

Advertising is about everything and everyone involved in creating, making and distributing the paid adverts you might be seeing on TV, billboards and online. The creative departments who come up with the ideas, the operations and planning teams who organise everything that needs to go ahead in order to make that advert, the production crew who actually do the filming, editing, graphics, etc and finally the distributors who book and schedule the advert.

And there’s no shortage of jobs for advertising agencies and other people involved. Advertising is everywhere; from the ads we see on buses to the sponsored posts we scroll past on TikTok. And it's not going away anytime soon - advertising as an industry is growing at a phenomenal rate, thanks to the increasing connectivity of the internet. As long as there are products to sell to people both online and offline, there will be a need for advertising.

Where advertising is focused on buying your way into the consumers brain, marketing is trying to connect with a consumer in non-paid ways.

Marketing focuses on understanding your audience and the psychology behind why someone will connect with a product or brand. You need to be able to identify the needs and wants of your target customers and craft messages that appeal to them. This requires a lot of analytical skills, and interest in psychology and plenty of creative thinking/problem-solving.

This doesn’t mean that money isn’t put into marketing campaigns - indeed, companies can have huge marketing budgets. But that money isn’t put into billboards, TV ads or social media ads (which is where advertising spends their budget) - it goes into creating community-building events, encouraging influencers to spread a hashtag on social media to increase awareness or other ‘softer’ selling techniques.

Indeed, many brands prefer to hire in-house marketers who can consistently build the brand with these kinds of methods, rather than hiring expensive advertising agencies to plug a product with a nationwide campaign.

PR (short for Public Relations) is all about building the reputation and trust of a brand or product by having other people talking about it.

Getting a brand name or message organically featured by others - e.g newspaper, on the radio or on an influencer’s blog - is incredibly hard but unbelievably valuable. Because people are more willing to trust a brand or product more when it’s being spoken about by other people in a positive way. Kind of like an authentic endorsement.

PR careers can be very rewarding, offering opportunities to work with a variety of clients and learn about many different industries.

PR is an excellent choice for those who want to make a difference in the world and build strong relationships with the people they work with.

👩🏽‍💻Did you know that around 197,000 people are employed in marketing in the UK (which is over 4x the amount of people employed as UK HGV drivers!)

🗯According to the PRCA, there were 95,000 Practitioners in PR and communications as of last year, which was a sizeable increase of 12,000 since 2016, and a massive increase of 33,000 since 2013!

👏🏻 Digital Marketing is one industry that has really grown in strength over the last decade! As of 2018, the sector had experienced 8 consecutive years of growth - wow! Media research firm, Group M, believes the industry grew by 4.8% last year (2019).

👯‍♀️In 2019, there were around 19,000 people employed in the UK Advertising and Marketing Industry. We can only assume that it has grown since then!

💯 The Advertising Industry has grown by more than a whopping 20% over the last decade!

💻With the developments in digital media and technology, there has been continuous new pathways to target customers created.

🔐However this means that the landscape has increased the pressure on creative quality.

📈Revenue growth is expected to average around 7% across the next decade.

🔥 It’s growing, fast! The UK has the fastest growing marketing industry in the world.

💬Employers love marketing skills. Digital marketing, social media marketing, and corporate communications are listed in the top 25 desirable skills by employer

⚡️On LinkedIn, there was a 63% increase in marketing jobs posted between January 2021-June 2021. Alongside that, around 380,000 marketing job listings were posted between June 2020 and June 2021! Which means there’s plenty of scope for budding marketers👀

🙌🏻PR and communications is a female dominated industry! (We love to see females running the industries!). According to the stats, it is 67% female and 33% male.

🤝 Gen-Z and Millennials fall in! The industry is also overwhelmingly young - with the most common age range being 25-34. The median age in the industry is 33.

🌟 The industry gender pay gap currently sits at 13.6%, an improvement on last year’s figure of 21% (things we love to see!). The pay difference between female and male employees is £6,412.

🧑‍🎓Went to a state-run or state-funded school? Us too. So did 71% of PR and communications practitioners! 20% attended an independent fee paying school. The remaining 7% attended a school outside of the UK.

Deloitte gave their insights on what the marketing industry will be looking like in the future:

💡Marketing will increasingly need to be over personalised, one-to-one, happening in real time and driven more by technology and data.

👨‍👩‍👧‍👧The era of intrusive, meaningless, and irrelevant advertising may be soon to be over and marketing may fully morph into customer advocacy.

👋🏻As a result, the roles that marketers hold currently may morph more into looking out for our customer’s best interests, and as brands, being there in the moments that matter."

👀 Cinema advertising expenditure is expected to shoot up by 201.1%! With other forms of media like Radio🎙, online display and TV📺 only increasing in expenditure by 4%, 8.3% and 5.3% respectively.

🤩The UK advertising industry is set to grow further over the next decade. This growth is expected to continue and be driven by a number of factors, including digitisation🆕, mass customisation🌟, AI🤖and blockchain.

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PR Trends currently shaping the Industry:

📱 Media outlets will rely more on contributed articles as full-time staff continues to shrink.

💬 PR professionals will use more social media channels to identify media opportunities.

🤗 Face-to-face interviews will make a comeback.

🐥 Social media, especially Twitter, will continue to be one of the speediest ways for subject matter experts to reach the media.

🎙 While local and national radio are still best for breaking news, podcasts are becoming more frequent and better for extended discussions of hot topics.

⚡️ Social consciousness will continue to grow in importance for buyers.

🌟 Successful PR will have to be part of a larger marketing ecosystem.

⏰ Remote work is changing media professionals’ schedules.

🔦 Readers want authenticity more than ever, especially as fake news has increased.

MediaSmart & TikTok’s educational resources about the advertising industry (with lesson plans)

IPA’s resources hub for young people that want to learn more about advertising careers (with teachers’ toolkit)

DMA’s quiz for young people to help them learn about the different marketing roles available

PRCA’s online booklet ‘Get To Know PR’ for young people that want to read more about what PR is