Press Release	7th March 2008
Gillian Rightford, Managing Director of Adtherapy, has been appointed as the lecturer for Advertising and Marketing Communications in the School of Management Science at the University of Cape Town.
She lectures two semesters: the first to third year Business Science students, and the second to students of the Post Graduate Marketing Diploma.
“This is the perfect starting point to achieve Adtherapy’s mission: to assist marketers in getting the very best advertising for their investment. So if, at a corporate level we’re looking at improving the quality of advertising output, by assessing and upweighting skills in agency and client teams; then at a University level, I aim to send the graduates into the workplace with theoretical skills and some great practical examples,” says Rightford.
For all the strategic importance of advertising to business and profitability, and for the amount business invests in marketing communications, far too little attention is given to skills development. Only the really big spenders have in-house training, and even the ACA’s widely anticipated training programme has fallen through.
Rightford’s goal in taking on the University role is to try and plug this gap. She says: ”The huge investment in time to develop a world class university course has allowed me to create some excellent courses for the industry: a strong theoretical grounding, mixed with inspiring and instructive examples from many of the best SA agencies, who have been tremendously supportive. My focus is on areas where skills are most often not optimal, for example Account Management in agencies, and for Marketers: Briefing, and evaluating Creative and giving feedback.
As she says, “Creating great advertising is not as easy as it looks, yet there are some simple fundamentals that can be learned, making the result far more rewarding, on every level”.