Awoken Presentation @ AAF National Student Advertising Competition from Laura Sortwell on Vimeo.

Ad Majorems presentation at AAF National Student Advertising Competition. aaf.org/default.asp?id=123

The assignment was to develop an integrated marketing campaign for the Century Council to reduce binge drinking on college campuses.

Presented by:
Laura Sortwell
Phil Moldavski
Marina Lvova
Kylen Preator
Tom Carroll

Created & Edited By: Laura Sortwell

This experience is best explained and lessoned learned by my good friend Phil Moldavski-  Click here

AAF NSAC: Lessons Learned

2009 MAY 3

by philmoldavski

Just got back from the AAF National Student Advertising Competition in New York this weekend. Our team unfortunately did not place as well as we hoped, but I did learn some pretty important lessons from the overall experience. The assignment was to develop an integrated marketing campaign for the Century Council to reduce binge drinking on college campuses.

The first: a great strategy requires the use of some courage and taking on risk. Our strategy was to combat the problem using a side door approach – the empowerment of women. We felt a key insight was the need for peer to peer contact to spark introspection and self initiated change, as well as the fact that previous social marketing campaigns have clearly shown that women are more receptive to change. There is a lot more research and insight that went into that decision, but the fact was we arguably didn’t target males age 18-24, which notoriously have the biggest binge drinking problems and additionally, none of our creatives actually showed/mentioned binge drinking directly. The result: we got the award for the most innovative position at the competition.

Second: a great RFP response involves great story telling. There is nothing like making a pitch book come alive than with a clear universally understandable story. In order to sell the concept of the campaign we essentially described ourselves as neuro-marketers. The pleasure center of the brain is highly developed in college students and studies show that viewing typical binge drinking ads actually sparks this pleasure center much in the same way drinking does. Thus, we explained we had to develop the forward thinking part of the brain through the concept of empowerment to make unconscious current drinking behavior more conscious. The result: one of the judges commented that he at first was skeptical on our pitchbook and didn’t understand the concept too well, but the presentation really made him change his mind.

Third: If time is kept constant, there is a big trade off between great creative and great strategy. Both take incredible amounts of time. The development of strategy took about 3 months, leaving only a week or so for the creative and countless all nighters. Looking back, we could have come up with great creatives and backed into a strategy just as well. The result: some of the judges weren’t too sold on the execution. One commented that after developing a strategy like this in a short amount of time that this is exactly where his firm would be in the process.

Overall, the whole experience felt like working in the business development side of the agency. It was fun, stressful, rewarding, but ultimately pretty painful when we heard we didn’t win the pitch.