Advertising Class

Capstone advertising class serves 50 clients

By Emily Hurd
J Alumni News staff

For students it’s a life-learning experience. They either fall in love with it or hate it — or both.

  For professors it’s taking a step back from lecturing and, instead, providing their “know-how.” It’s a time to see what their students are really made of.

  For many clients it’s a fresh perspective, new ideas and welcome change. It’s the opportunity to do something that otherwise would have been out of reach.

  It’s the Advertising 498 campaigns class, the culmination of advertising students’ college learning experience. Over the past 10 years the UNL campaigns class has served 50 clients in the university community, Lincoln community, statewide and nationally.

  Campaigns is essentially a semester-long project with a real client. The students conduct research, facilitate focus groups, coordinate surveys, outline strategy plans, conduct media analysis and execute creative pieces. Finally, the students present their advertising and public relations campaign to their client, advertising faculty and community members, as well as the dean and associate dean of the college.

  From the first week of class, students are assigned positions on their team to emulate a real-world agency experience. There are typically two or three teams per class with six to 12 members per team. Their positions range from account executive, media planner and research director to copywriter and creative director.

  Anne Potts, the creative director of a spring 2002 team, commented on how time-consuming the class was. “It has the demands of a full-time job on top of so much pressure from other classes and job-searching.” However, she said she thought campaigns was one of the most accurate, real-world classes she has ever taken.

  Nancy Mitchell, associate professor of advertising and department chair, said that, on graduation exit interviews and course evaluations, it’s common to have students say campaigns is both the best and worst class they’ve taken at the university. The class is a stressful undertaking for many students, but it’s a life-learning experience they can transfer directly to the real world. More importantly, it’s a valuable experience in teamwork.

  As a land grant research institution, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has made outreach and service to the community and nation a priority. The campaigns class is a perfect example of this, Mitchell said. The campaigns professors carefully hand-pick the clients that will be used for the class. They first make sure there is an educational component to the client’s needs and that it is broad or specific enough to provide something for the students to really work with. Secondly, they make sure the class is not taking away business from a commercial agency. Many of the students’ clients are non-profit organizations searching for a way to find fresh, new ways to tell their stories.

  Mitchell keeps a “projects” file of client ideas for future classes. She says that client ideas come mostly from word-of-mouth but also from some of the most unlikely places. “I went to the doctor one day and even he wanted me to have a class do a campaign for him,” Mitchell said.

  Mitchell explains that the class is an exercise not only for the students, but for the professors as well. The teacher becomes a facilitator, keeping students on track but not providing them with solutions to their problems. Mitchell said, “It allows the students to experience real learning in overcoming their struggles as a team and gives them full ownership of the project. At times it’s difficult for the students to understand why we won’t give them more answers.”

  Most of the 50 clients have used at least portions of the students’ campaigns in their businesses. In recent years Lincoln Children’s Museum, Nebraska Army National Guard, Nebraska Urban Indian Healthcare, Homestead National Monument and Downtown Lincoln Association have all used student ideas in their advertising and promotion.

  Mayla Deberg, executive director of FreshStart Home, a non-profit transitional housing program for homeless women, said, “It was wonderful. I had one of my board members attend (the presentation), too, and we were both very pleased with the results. I think the UNL student population is under-used. Students have so many talents and fresh ideas.” Two student teams worked on the FreshStart Home campaign, and the organization has since used both teams’ work to obtain $5,000 of funding from Lincoln Benefit Life to produce new brochures.

  In addition to working within the community, the UNL Advertising Department has also worked nationally. In fact the first campaigns class in the early 1990s won a Macintosh competition and provided the school with several Macintosh computers.

  In recent years, UNL has taken part in a nationwide competition sponsored by the American Advertising Federation, creating campaigns for the New York Times, the American Red Cross, Saturn and, this spring, Banc of America.

      In the fall of 2000, five student teams worked with adidas and its advertising agency in San Francisco to develop a campaign for the UNL Athletic Department. Six representatives from the agency and one from adidas flew to Lincoln to brief the teams on their project and again at the end of the semester to hear the students’ final presentations. The teams also worked locally with UNL athletic director Bill Byrne.

      Advertising professor Stacy James, one of the instructors for the adidas campaigns teams, said working with adidas gave the students and the instructors the opportunity to work nationally with a big-time, for-profit client and provided exposure to agency professionals in a larger West Coast market. The adidas campaign was a competition between the five teams, but James said, “Campaigns is not about winning or losing or even whether or not work gets produced and used by the client. It’s about the experience of it all and learning the process of creating campaigns.”