Luiggi Sarrias has been teaching for 20 years and is one of the longest-serving lecturers in the Faculty of Communication Sciences at UIC Barcelona. His career has led him to observe a change in students and their view of advertising. “Students’ attention span has diminished and they find it difficult to consume content that is longer than one minute”, explains Sarrias This is why, in 2022, Luiggi Sarrias launched his book La Historia de Trece (The Story of Thirteen), a journey through life through advertising in a book accompanied by QR codes that help narrate his story.
“My goal was to get my students to read,” explains Sarrias. Now, given the speed at which technology is evolving, the world of advertising is facing a new challenge: artificial intelligence. “AI will cover some of the things that advertisers do, but it will not replace creativity,” he says emphatically. “For example, we used an AI tool to create headlines, and out of 200 submissions, only four were kept,” he explains. “In contrast, in a class, I approve maybe twenty-five ideas from students,” Sarrias adds. According to the lecturer, tasks such as media planning, customer service or marketing strategies rely on creativity that cannot be provided by AI.
“At UIC Barcelona, we put the student at the centre, and we try to encourage their creativity,” he says. In the highly competitive world of advertising and branding, Sarrias tries to prepare students for their future job interviews, where he encourages them to be very ‘forward thinking’. “They have to offer a plus, there are many graduates on the market”, he points out This is why the department supports them in undertaking projects such as podcasts, writing literature or making professional use of their social networks to achieve a differentiating element in their CVs.
The student, according to the lecturer, not only has to be constantly up to date with what is happening in advertising, but also with what is happening in the market. “They need to know what's trending on TikTok, which programme is running in prime time, what clothes are being worn, or familiarise themselves with concepts such as the Silver Economy,” he explains. This is the reason why, for Luiggi Sarrias, studying Advertising and Public Relations has to be vocational, as it entails an ‘inordinate’ amount of attention to what is happening around us.
What, then, is the great challenge of teaching advertising at university? Luiggi Sarrias is clear in his answer: that students should believe how important it is in society. Projects such as Nude Project, a clothing brand, or VICIO, a hamburger chain, came about as a result of youth entrepreneurship and the strategic use of social networks. “We have a former student who has just set up his own patisserie in Plaça del Diamant, in the Gracia district of Barcelona, and he has done an excellent job of social networking,” explains Luiggi Sarrias.
The teacher, however, urges caution. “The average number of people in the world who watch a Twitch channel is 3” he says Another revealing piece of data is that a brand sees an increase in followers of just 3% a month on average. Anything above that is ‘seen as a success’. On World advertising Day, Luiggi Sarrias encourages young people to be creative, to differentiate themselves from others and to believe in the changing world of brands and advertising.
