A team of 28 University students from Assoc. Marketing Prof. Carrie Heilman’s Integrated Marketing Communications Campaigns class took first place in a nationwide advertising competition last week.
The annually held National Student Advertising Competition, conducted by the American Advertising Federation, included more than 150 student teams from different colleges around the country. Participating teams were required to build their own integrated marketing campaign for this year’s client, Snapple.
Students were tasked with creating a new tagline and new advertising campaign for Snapple’s teas and juices. Teams worked all year to generate ideas and marketing research in order to create a written campaign “pitch book” and a 20-minute presentation to give at regional and national competitions.
This year, the University’s team won both the overall competition and also the award for Best Research.
Students were all members of Heilman’s “Promotions” class — a nine-credit, two-semester course which includes the competition as part of its curriculum and final project in the spring.
Recent Commerce School graduate Elyse Eilerman, a member of the winning team, was both a class account executive and a part of the presentation team who pitched the campaign to judges at each stage of the competition.
In addition to the hands-on computer design skills she learned, Eilerman said the class taught her the finer points of determination and teamwork.
“Working with and leading students on this type of project gave me so much knowledge on how to be an effective leader — in great part through trial and error,” Eilerman said in an email.
Both Eilerman and Heilman emphasized the time commitment the class requires of students.
“Typical workloads [varied] depending on what committees were in crunch time on a given week, but there were many late nights, many cheesy breads, and honestly these were some of my most rewarding nights of college,” Eilerman said in an email.
Students also partnered with companies Noldus Facereader Technology and Dialsmith to conduct consumer surveys in order to create their innovative marketing campaign, Eilerman said.
Heilman said she is responsible for teaching the students the general principles of advertising, creative strategy and brand management. Students generate all their own original ideas for the competition and the course work.
The class provides students with a realistic, immersive experience in a widely competitive business market, Heilman said.
“This is the best academic offering at the University for students interested in Advertising and/or brand strategy because it affords the students a real-world, hands-on experience with an actual client,” Heilman said in an email. “Furthermore, because of the competition structure, it forces the students to compete to ‘win the business’ of the client, something they will have to do once they get out in the real world.”
A University team has now won the championship a total of three times since its inception in 1980.
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