Students Research and Create with Hopes to Win National Student Advertising Competition

Liberty’s Advertising Team won second place in the Effie Collegiate Competition this summer and is now preparing for this year’s National Student Advertising Competition (NSAC) sponsored by Oculus. 

According to Liberty News, Liberty’s Advertising Team competed with over 130 teams in the Effie Collegiate Competition over the summer. Their assignment for the competition was to create a marketing campaign for Bose wireless earbuds.

According to the American Advertising Federation (AAF), the NSAC competition consists of more than 2,000 college students who use real-world practices to develop a marketing, media, and advertising campaign for a corporate client. 

Caitlyn Richard, Liberty’s Advertising Team advisor, explained how students are preparing  for this year’s major competition.

Richard said the yearlong preparation began in August. Students will develop one campaign until March and then present it in April. This year, the students will do experimental research with Oculus glasses.

With such a long and intense research process, Richard said that specific plans will be kept secret until the team is presenting its campaign to prevent other schools from copying the team’s marketing research and strategies or advertising ideas.

Current Advertising Team member Abigail Hickman shared her thoughts on what it is like to be on the team. 

“I’ve been on the ad team for a few weeks now and it’s a lot of fun but very intense,” Hickman said. “The work we’re doing is serious and focused. Instead of doing just a generalized target audience, we do very detailed, in-depth analysis of the specific client.” 

Both Richards and Hickman said that the research process is very detail-oriented, in consideration of the specific client that hosts the competition. This year, the host is Oculus, a virtual reality headset company.

The research requires students to uncover anything they can find about the company’s customers, marketing strategies, advertising styles, products and more. Students draw from the knowledge they have gained in the classroom to build their strategy and blend in their creativity as they present their campaign at the competition. 

Even though the team must go through extreme processes for the competition, students love being in the team according to last year’s member and second place winner Cassandra Sappington. 

“It was a really great experience,” Sappington said. “I definitely learned a lot of things [and] got a glimpse of what it was actually like to work on a campaign. There’s a lot of moving pieces to it.” 

Wallace is a news reporter. Follow her on Twitter at @kait1200.