I want to work in advertising. Which major is better for this, Business/Marketing or Communications?

I'm a college freshman and my declared major is currently Business/Marketing, however I'm not crazy about a lot of the business classes I have to take and I talked to my advisor who told me that might be a sign that I should change my major. But a friend told me today that he knows someone who graduated with a communications degree to go into advertising but preference was sometimes given to business/marketing people. So is communications as good as B/M?

Advertising has 2 sides:

the business side of it does client management, account planning, research, media (although a diff department) etc.

the creative side does art direction, creatives, retouching, digital imaging etc

First explore some of the ad agencies and decide what side you like. Then look at what kind of positions are listed at those agencies....target one of those positions...this will help you narrow down your choices.

Mind you: Ad agencies do not pay well innitially...but once u r hooked and enjoy the work...you will love it! Also, most agencies don't hire creatives that frequently...but jobs on management side are immense. To succeed on creative...start building your portfolio!

That was the same problem i had when I started college. I am a communication mayor and I am focusing in PR with a minor in Marketing, that took off a lot of the math classes for marketing. If you want to focus on advertising make sure you have a lot of digital imaging classes. Also if you can get a second language to focus on and maybe even do an internship with that right there will open a lot of doors. Try to get involve in your school's news paper and learn how to write well, and work with their advertising.
All of these have been advises from grad students, professors and personal experience. Try talking to people on the field or your teachers, unfortunately advisors are sometimes clueless.
Hope this helps and best of luck in school.

If you want to be a media planner or acct manager, you really should take the bus/mktg path. You can get into advertising with a comm degree (copywriting, my occupation, with a cog sci deg, go fig), but you'll have a hard time landing that first planning job without something that evidences your basic knowledge of the business of mktg/adv. If you can land some internships, really impress them & make some solid connections, your comm deg will be less a factor.
It depends on what you want to do in Adv/Mktg.