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Build and present a campaign in this 2-week advertising and PR program for high school students on UCLA’s campus.
Course Description
A logo may catch your eye, but a campaign needs its brand, audience, message, and media to tell the same story. Build those pieces and see how they work together.
In this course you will examine how product, price, promotion, and sales channels work together to make familiar brands memorable. Create a company, name its product, and design an initial visual identity. Market research helps you decide who to reach and shape a marketing plan around that audience.
Develop messages, slogans, and jingles, choose channels, and create assets using tools such as Canva, PowerPoint, or Google Slides. Real campaigns introduce advertising techniques before you write and record a 30-second radio spot or storyboard a television commercial.
Public relations tests another side of the idea: how a company explains itself when its reputation is at stake. Write a press release or crisis communication, and observe advertising around the UCLA campus. Your team will refine and present a complete product, advertising, and PR campaign. Explaining the choices connects creative work with the research and strategy behind it.
This two-week course takes place at UCLA. The course is available to residential and commuter students. The program is developed by UCLA and offered in partnership with Summer Discovery.
What You Will Do
• Make product, pricing, promotion, and sales-channel choices for familiar brands and an original company
• Name a product and create its logo, identity and core message
• Develop a marketing plan based on audience research and campaign goals
• Write slogans and jingles, then select appropriate media channels
• Record a 30-second radio ad or storyboard a television commercial
• Create PR or crisis materials and present an integrated final campaign
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course, students will be able to:
• Explain how audience, positioning, media, and marketing choices shape a campaign
• Connect brand, advertising, and public-relations choices around a common purpose
• Support marketing recommendations with audience research and clear reasoning
You’ll leave with your team’s brand identity, marketing plan, creative assets, campaign presentation, and a certificate of completion.
Why Marketing Communications Skills Matter
Advertising and public relations turn audience insight into a focused message. Students must decide what a customer values, which claim the evidence supports and how the idea should change across visual, audio and written formats. Those choices build strategic thinking as well as creative discipline.
A complete campaign also requires collaboration and revision. The logo, marketing plan, media choices and PR response must feel connected. Presenting that system helps students explain why they made each decision, respond to questions and see how research, writing, design and business strategy work together.
Who Should Attend?
For students who have completed 9th, 10th, 11th, or 12th grade.
If you notice why some campaigns stay with you and enjoy imagining one of your own, this course connects the creative work with its strategy. Research, writing, visual design, and public relations give you different ways to contribute to a shared campaign.
You’ll collaborate on a sustained project and present the decisions behind it. You should be comfortable using a laptop for campaign development.
Recommended by More Than 4 out of 5 Students
Based on students surveyed in Summer Discovery’s 2026 UCLA high school program.
Your Summer at UCLA
UCLA gives high-school students the opportunity to explore an academic interest while experiencing university life in Los Angeles, a city where entertainment, technology, business, science, and culture constantly intersect. The campus has its own community and rhythm while connecting students to a wider environment built around creativity and new ideas.
Students learn alongside peers, navigate a large campus, and gain independence through everyday choices and responsibilities. Time outside class expands the experience through friendships, campus life, and opportunities to notice which subjects and settings hold their attention. For families, UCLA offers a valuable combination of substantive academics, personal growth, and clearer direction about what a student may want to study, experience more deeply, or pursue next.
After successfully finishing this course, you will be awarded a certification completion for your accomplishment.
*This is a preview, not what you will receive