Communication students participate in national advertising competition

A team from Liberty University’s School of Communication participated recently in the district National Student Advertising Competition, sponsored by the American Advertising Federation.

LU is one of 150 colleges and universities that participate in the competition nationwide. It is part of District 3, which includes these schools in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina: the University of North Carolina, University of South Carolina, Wake Forest University, Washington and Lee University, Appalachian State University and Radford University.

Danielle Lanz, Jonathan Kafoure, Sarah Deskins, Allison Parks and Hillary Greene served as presenters for the LU Ad Team, which made a sales presentation of behalf of America Online Instant Messenger (AIM).

“I had to audition for presenters,” said Dr. Terri Lynn Cornwell, the team’s advisor and professor of communication studies. “That shows a lot of kids were interested. I’m proud of them.”

For the past five years, LU’s Ad team has selected a corporate client for its presentation. Last year’s client was Coca Cola.

About 40 students in the Communication school took part in developing the sales presentation, which was presented in April at the district competition in Charlotte, N.C. Research for the project starts in the fall semester and continues throughout the school year.

“We choose an account manager every year and we have assistants who are in charge of different parts of the project,” Cornwell said. “They work with students in our capstone advertising class over the course of the year. Our creativity is our strength each time. Our presentations are always very well done.”

The participating students are in the school’s advertising and public relations concentration.
Nationwide, the advertising competition involves 15 districts.

“A thousand or so students are involved nationally,” Cornwell said. “The winner of each district goes to the national competition, which will be held this year in Atlanta.”

The University of Virginia has won the District 3 competition nearly every year for the past 20 years.
“Two years ago, UVa won the national competition,” Cornwell said.

She said she’s encouraged by the positive comments made by judges this year in regards to the LU team.

“When I started here, Liberty had not been competing for several years,” she said.