Designers... do you have a formal marketing education?
 

Just curious... of the designers here, do any of you have a college degree in marketing?

Not I...

Do traffic pushers have the same? :pimp

Me: marketing, business, and economics. I already knew how to program before college so I didn't bother with that.

Broadcasting / Advertising

:1orglaugh

and wtf is going a marketing degree going to teach me?

I do. I don't think it should be that important though, in mainstream business marketing people aren't designers and designers aren't marketing people nor they have a reason to be it. Problem is adult industry has a pretty particular business model where 1 person is supposed to have the knowledge of a Marketing degree, a systems degree, an electronic art degree, a MBA and maybe some journalism/PR degree, and you can tell by the state of things: programs and established companies are closing doors every single day

I would much, Much, MUCH rather have a designer with a 4 year degree in graphic design from some place like SCAD...

There is absolutely NO experience like real experience when it comes to marketing creatives. I'd rather sculpt a bad ass designer into a bad ass marketing designer than hire a crappy designer that's good at marketing ;)

Especially when you consider things like... calls to action, verbiage, layout, etc... all vary by industry/market.

I would hope the school would take care of that.

Oh, I agree 100%.

it all depends on whether you want to make money or look beautiful. If you can have both, them better, and I'm not denying the influence of a well designed ad piece on purchase decisions (I consider myself a pretty decent designer even though I've no formal education in design), but if I had to choose only one of those, I'd hire the exact opposite one, I'd rather make money even if my site is done with Frontpage than having the hottest design to show my peeps and not make a single sale.

You can't teach talent or experience.
You can teach just about everything else.

Degrees do not tell you if a person is talented, they tell you if a person was capable of sticking with a mission for multiple years to earn a degree. I'd always take the guy with talent over the guy with the degrees. I have a wall full of degrees and none of them have done as much for me as the talents I had before I ever enrolled in those places or the experience Ive earned since graduating from them.

if you have photoshop and will work for peanuts >you're hired< ... seriously, nobody knows what talent is or cares . The super talented graphic designers with degrees have jobs in marketing firms, if they don't they're on the peanut train with everyone else

You can't teach someone to be a good designer..

You need to be born with at least some artistic ability.

University Cybernetics, College Management Studies ( Major in Finance )

Fucking Correct.

The main problem with graphic designer is that they want always draw cool layouts, original shapes, they think to reinvent the wheel every time sitting in front of their photoshop.
A little number of designers know how important are concepts like "call to action", "above the fold", "hero shoot".