An overwhelming victory at the regional portion of the National Student Advertising Competition has the Portland State advertising team thinking of loftier goals.
In the regional competition on April 28, the team, known as 486 Advertising among its members, finished well ahead of second-place finisher and favorite University of Oregon in the District 11 regional.
The team was graded on its 20-minute presentation and its 32-page plans book, with each medium scored out of 40 points. PSU finished with 67.1 combined points out of 80, easily besting Oregon’s score of 59.1. The team’s victory will allow it to move on to the national competition in Austin, Texas, June 2–5.
“It’s a great opportunity to go to Austin. The competition is a big part of it, but minor in the grand scheme. It’s where a lot of professionals go to receive awards. This is the site of the national conference. It’s $400 per ticket just to attend; this will be a great opportunity for the team,” said Tim Christy, faculty advisor for the group and PSU assistant professor of marketing and advertising management.
“It’s been a few years since PSU has gone to nationals. We’re setting the foundation for next year and what’s going to be expected of next year’s class. We want to prove that we’re a great advertising program,” communication senior Jae Specht said.
It will take additional help for the entire group to get to nationals, however. Typically, only each team’s advisor and presenters receive funding to go to regionals. As there are 10 members of 486 Advertising and only five of them are involved with the presentation, half of the group will have to pay their own way.
But this is where the team’s greatest strength is revealed: its loyalty and insistence on maintaining itself, valuing each member’s contribution equally. The team is attempting to raise funds to ensure that all members can attend the conference.
“We want to send all 10 of our members, so we try to help them reach their funding goals. Each member has to raise a certain amount, and right now we’re about $1,000 short,” Christy said.
“We are going to do a presentation on May 23. Within our program, we’ve been doing fundraising the last few weeks. We love donations,” Specht said.
This presentation will take place in the Smith Memorial Student Union next Wednesday, May 23. The group will be giving its presentation and accepting donations for members to reach the Austin conference in June.
Christy, however, wanted to make it clear that the motivation for the event was not simply to raise money; rather, it was to raise interest in PSU advertising.
“The event on May 23 is more of a recruitment, as well as a celebration. We do it every year, whether we win or not. It’s more of a way to promote the national competition and the advertising team in general,” Christy said. “There’s going to be a 20-minute presentation, and then I’m going to talk about nationals and offer applications for next year’s team. We do use it to ask for additional funding, but that’s secondary,” he added.
Christy hopes that the students view the national competition as more of a positive experience in terms of promoting themselves rather than as simply an event that needs to be won. “What counts is not the competition but the experience they can share to prospective employers. Focusing on winning is limiting your thinking,” Christy said.
This especially held true during the buildup to the team’s regional victory. The process provided members with insight into how they would create such presentations in the future as well as how difficult it is to initially create them.
According to Christy, the plans book went through at least eight or nine drafts before being finalized, and through seven drafts before it was even laid out. Often the team would have to stay past 1 a.m. to finish work on certain portions.
But the hard work hadn’t even started there. Before putting their ideas together, they needed to come up with an idea for the ad campaign Nissan pitched, and it was a difficult process.
Nissan, a manufacturer of cars and trucks, gave the team its assignment, which was to create an advertising campaign for the company that would hit three designated demographics: Chinese Americans, Hispanic Americans and African Americans. The team was also expected to target the youth segment of all three populations. The group found itself immediately wondering how to proceed.
“At the beginning of winter term, we were starting to get into the creative concept. We didn’t have a firm idea of what we wanted to do, so we had people come to the table and offer their ideas. We talked about how Nissan cars had been average but were beginning to look sexier. We analyzed the idea of duality from that and played along with it. We went along with that and came up with our concept,” said marketing senior David Hart.
“All three of the subcultures are proud of their backgrounds here, and we wanted that as part of their identity. But they’re also Americans; they were born and raised here and know the culture. That added to the idea of duality,” said marketing senior Lane Martell.
This idea culminated in the product that the team eventually put out, which they named Two Lives, One Life. It related the idea of Nissan’s duality as both a sensible-seeming and sexy-looking vehicle with the duality of Americans from different ethnic backgrounds balancing their cultural identities with inherited pressures to adhere to American societal norms.
“There were four judges, all people in the industry. For the score, the judges graded both the presentation and the book; they went through different sections and weighted things differently. We won Best Presentation, and Lane won Best Male Presenter,” Specht said.
“What’s greatest is that our presentation very much rocked the boat. We continue to put PSU on the map. We’re showing ourselves off. Prior members feel like they’re part of something even though they’re not here anymore. We want to develop the 486 name,” Hart said.
“Portland advertising has typically been seen as just Wieden+Kennedy. We want it to be seen as Wieden+Kennedy and 486 Advertising,” Specht said.
Still, the students have a lot that they are proud of and hope to continue to promote the university and the city itself through their work.
“I’m really proud of the team. I’ve never seen a tighter group of 10 people, and have never seen a group balance their skills like this. I’m proud of the work they’ve done. It means a lot for PSU and Portland in general,” Christy said.