Business students gain an insight into the advertising and marketing industry from Birmingham agency owner

A leading marketing expert has been working with our BTEC Foundation Diploma in Business to give them an insight into the industry. 

Anthony Tattum founded the Birmingham-based Big Cat agency nearly 18 years ago after successfully promoting music events and venues across the city. Today, the city centre agency, which is made up of a branding and creative team, a PR and social media team, a digital marketing & development and a strategy & planning team is proud to have created many hugely effective communications campaigns in key sectors including retail, hospitality, healthcare, leisure & destination and charity. 

Working with two groups of students he spoke about developing a nine-point approach to planning, booking and deploying an advertising campaign using work carried out with Redditch’s Kingfisher Shopping Centre and Umbrella – the Birmingham and Solihull focused sexual health service – as case studies. 

Anthony explained: “Our campaigns are based purely on delivering results using the most appropriate media. We set SMART objectives, identify the correct audience and then map the media to optimise the marketing budget.   

“In the 30-minute seminars I took the students through a nine-step approach used in developing a campaign before discussing various media including Google AdWords, social media and radio and a variety of marketing tools.” 

UCB lecturer Simon Chatterton explained that it was a fantastic experience for the students to listen to an industry expert's perspective on developing a marketing campaign. This helped them to relate the theory taught on the BTEC course to the real world of marketing, and will help prepare them for their upcoming Marketing exam.