Adding up successes

Ad team beats UVA, UNC in the Regional Student Advertising Competition

When the judges called their school’s name, Liberty University’s advertising team erupted with excitement.

“Everybody but our professor and the one guy on the team started crying,” Caitlyn Richard, the team’s general manager, said.

The team earned first place in the district-level round of the National Student Advertising Competition April 7.

The competition is held by the American Advertising Federation, the oldest and most prestigious trade association in the U.S., according to faculty advisor Stuart Schwartz.

“It was just a cool testimony moment for our school and our department that we went in there and truly displayed that if it’s Christian, it ought to be better – and I guess on Friday it was,” Richard said.

Teams from Liberty’s Department of Digital Media and Communication Arts competed in past years but never made it past third place in regionals.

This year, the students competed against eight other district teams to develop a marketing campaign for Tei Pei Frozen Asian Food specifically targeted to millennials.

Among these teams were the University of North Carolina, which won second place, and the University of Virginia, last year’s national champion, which placed third.

“UVA and UNC are some of the most prestigious and oldest communication departments in the country, so for Liberty to go in and win was honestly a shock to everyone,” Richard said. “I personally thought, ‘They won nationally — there’s no way that we could take them just in our district.’”

Katie Clinebell, the team’s creative and strategy director, said they had researched millennials’ perceptions of Tei Pei and what barriers kept them from purchasing it. They tried to find the most creative and compelling solutions to overcoming those barriers.

The team of 23 students worked for roughly nine months on the campaign. In total, they had more than 5,700 research impressions, including collecting more than 3,800 survey responses and holding more than 20 focus groups and more than 130 taste testings, according to Schwartz.

Richard said she spent many hours a week working the project in addition to her other classwork.

“In so many moments, I could have said, ‘Well, this is good enough for now,’” Richard said. “I think that if we hadn’t been so committed to saying, ‘No, this could be better – this isn’t our best yet,’ we wouldn’t have won.”

The team comprised mostly of seniors faced a series of challenges along the way.

The first hurdle was writing a 27-page campaign plan book.

The week before it was due, the team worked until 2 a.m. each night, Clinebell said.

“That week was rough — real rough,” Clinebell said.

They made the deadline with only four minutes to spare, according to Richard.

They finally traveled to Cary, North Carolina to present at the district competition, but their challenges were not over yet.

They ran into trouble with their banners and had to make a late-night Target run to fix them.

Then the sound system in their hotel did not work, so they had to re-edit the audio and videos several hours before presenting.

But all the difficulties melted away during the presentation.

“When we hit the last, final presentation slide … you kind of just felt it in the room,” Richard said.

“It was flawless. We’d never practiced better than the time we presented.”

The judges responded favorably with no negative feedback, she said.

“What the judges said is, ‘You made an emotional appeal to your audience, and that will always sell a product,” Richard said. “And we did that — we didn’t try to just sell frozen food in the frozen food aisle.”

Richard and Clinebell gave God the credit for the victory, saying he provided creativity, endurance and peace.

“I was overwhelmed at his faithfulness because he didn’t have to do that,” Clinebell said. “He would be just as good if we came in last place as if we came in first.”

According to Schwartz, the experience will help the students prepare for their future careers by mirroring future job assignments and providing a prestigious award for their resumes.

“I think that our students did an awesome job, and I am very, very proud of what they have accomplished,” Schwartz said. “I am honored to be a part of it.”

For the upperclassmen team, the victory means more work as they prepare for semifinals May 4-5, when teams from 16 districts will give a 15-minute presentation and interview over the phone.

Finally, nationals will take place in New Orleans, Louisiana June 7-10.

“Most of the students on this team are seniors, so we’re all at our ends and just pushing toward Commencement in a couple weeks,” Richard said.

But she said seeing the fruit of their work in their recent success motivates them to keep pushing.

“It was the highlight of my entire college career,” Richard said.

Pors is a feature reporter