Coca-Cola campaign propels SCAD into spotlight

By: Christina E. Spitz and Monique Bos

Published: Friday, April 20, 2007

Friday the 13th turned out to be a lucky day for a team of 16 advertising design students from the Savannah College of Art and Design. The students won first place at the regional level of the National Student Advertising Com­petition, held by the American Advertising Federation, the same organization that coordinates the ADDY Awards, April 13.

SCAD was one of eight colleges competing at the AAF Seventh District Conference in Tuscaloosa, Ala. Approximately 150 colleges in 15 districts participated in the initial phase of the competition, and winners from each will compete at the national finals June 7-8 in Louisville, Ky.

“[The AAF] wants to encourage talented young people to come into the business,” said advertising design professor Stephen Hall. “They get a real client and figure out a project or assignment they want help with that is offered up to students at colleges all over the country.”

This year’s client was Coca-Cola, and student teams were charged with creating advertising campaigns that appealed to members of the 13- to 24-year-old demographic. Clients in past competitions have included Toyota, Chrysler and Yahoo!.

The regional contest was judged by five advertising professionals, including a marketing executive from Coca-Cola, as well as Robert Grede, author of the best-selling book “Naked Marketing,” and executives from Ogilvy and Mather and Adweek.

“It’s a great thing for the SCAD students because they will be able to network with advertising people from all over the country,” said professor Art Novak. “[Companies are] looking for fresh new talent, so it’s a great way for students to get leads for jobs and get job offers.”

“The winning team members are pretty much guaranteed job offers,” said Hall. They’re getting recruited on the spot. The top companies go to this competition.”

The students developed their advertising campaign during a winter quarter special topics course taught by Novak, although they began meeting during Fall 2006 and have continued the project during the spring quarter. The three-year-old SCAD advertising program is participating in the competition for the first time.

To develop an angle for their Coca-Cola campaign, Novak’s students surveyed their peers and discovered that charitable causes and community service are important to members of their demographic.

So the SCAD team chose an unusual approach. “This concept involves forsaking traditional product-centered advertising for messages in the public interest,” Novak said. “We wanted to take a risk and take a chance. [The targeted demographic] has grown up with advertising and they’ve become so inundated with it … so cynical about it and just oversaturated [that] it’s really hard to get through to them and to get a message across.”

The team sought to emphasize community-centered initiatives. In SCAD’s plan, Coca-Cola would partner with five charities — the Natural Resources Defense Council, Americorps, the Humane Society of the United States, Habitat for Humanity and Mothers Against Drunk Driving — to do good while promoting an altruistic image for the company. Consumers could purchase specially marked bottles of Coca-Cola to contribute points to their cause of choice.

To create buzz for this campaign, the team suggested replacing the Coca-Cola display in New York City’s Times Square on New Year’s Eve with the Coca-Cola “ribbon” logo and displaying it for a year.

Novak said, “The Coca-Cola ribbon ties Coca-Cola to these causes on two levels, because it is also part of the Coca-Cola graphic.”

The team created TV commercials and reorganized Coca-Cola’s Web site around their concepts, providing podcasts that allow users to download information about the charities.

In the competition, each team’s score was based 50 percent on a 32-page plans book and 50 percent on a 20-minute presentation, plus a 10-minute question-and-answer session with the judges. The judges rated the SCAD team first in both categories, a rare occurrence, according to Novak.

“Creating an NSAC advertising plan requires teamwork, diplomacy, resiliency, perseverance and the ability to keep your cool when the heat is on,” he said. “These are the qualities prized by advertising agencies, and these are the skills honed throughout the NSAC experience.”

The five onstage presenters for the NSAC team were students Ronia Holmes, Josh Wells, Nick Totaro, Tara Henderson and Laura Kessler, who were selected by auditions. Other students in attendance were Rachel Duch, Mimia Johnson, Feifei Sun, Todd Perelmuter and Kelcey Steele. The other members of the team are Matt Schaffer, Matt Richardson, Sheldon Melvin, Christie Bicker­staff, Stephanie Weisen­sale and Jake Wright. Novak, advertising design department chair David Foote and Hall also attended the conference.

In addition to the team accolade, Holmes won the individual Outstanding Presenter award, and Sun received a $1,000 Jan Gardner Scholarship, which is given to talented students in advertising-related disciplines.

“[Knowing that] our creative was good, our research was excellent and our marketing was on point helped to build confidence behind the delivery,” said Holmes.

Other advertising design faculty members also discussed their areas of expertise with the students. Hall talked about marketing strategies, William Shanahan talked about research and media, Lindsay Hadley shared information about production, and Chercy Lott videotaped the auditions.

SCAD students outside the advertising design department also helped the team. Ryan Duhaime, a senior broadcast design and motion graphics and visual effects student — and winner of the Best in Show award at the SCADDY and regional ADDY awards competitions — contributed animation; Brandon Clark, a junior majoring in sequential art and sound design, wrote an original song; Mike Boyle, a sophomore majoring in film and television, directed a TV commercial; Derek Randall, a senior majoring in performing arts, played a newscaster in that commercial; and Andria Phillips, a senior majoring in photography, took photographs for a “Girls of Advertising” calendar designed to raise money to support the NSAC team.

“The great thing about being in advertising design is that advertising takes in all these other disciplines,” Novak said. “It’s really a collaborative effort, and that’s where I think the college excels and makes a mark in advertising education.”

Spitz is senior publications editor at SCAD.