Portland State advertising team wins regional competition

A Portland State student advertising team took first place in the northwest district’s National Student Advertising Competition, an annual competition sponsored by the American Advertising Federation (AAF). The team won out against top schools from Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Idaho and Montana.

The team of 11 students, advised by professors Don Dickinson and Tim Christy, will compete in the national championships this June against the other regional winners. Portland State has won the regional competition five times and placed as high as fifth in the nation.

The assignment this year was to create a campaign for The Century Council, an organization created to help promote responsible drinking among college students, and to eliminate underage drinking and driving.

Past years’ competitions have focused on advertising for products more than concepts, and team member Becky Brown was happy that this subject was important for students.

“The opportunity to present a campaign relevant to us as college students was challenging and invigorating,” Brown said.

Participant Kala Boucher, a senior in the business school, felt a little burned out after devoting months and months to the project.

“Working on the campaign was rough for a while. I felt like I was living in the ad lab and a lot of times I wouldn’t leave campus until after midnight. I felt like such a nerd,” Boucher said.

But for her, the learning experience and the win made it all worth it.

“However, when they announced that Portland State University placed first, the time and energy invested seemed like nothing compared to how that moment felt. I learned so much and this was a great experience to walk away with right when I’m graduating,” she said.

Professor Don Dickinson, Portland State’s Director Of Advertising Management, was the student’s main advisor for the first several months of the creative process.

“I was in the advertising industry for 30 years before I became an educator,” Dickinson said. “It’s really impressive to see the kind of work that college students do.”

The campaign that the team came up with contained several elements, one of which was the language that students realistically use when they talk about drinking.

“One of our biggest findings was that binge drinking was not a credible term among college students, and that the actual terminology was ‘getting wasted,'” Dickinson said.

“Our sub-theme was ‘What else are you wasting by getting wasted?'” he added.

Dickinson explained the process; the team chose 13 realistic consequences of “getting wasted,” including inadequate sexual performance and scholarship revocation. He said the students then tied them together in a thematic approach. 

“Everything that the students presented they did themselves, and they were quite proud of it, deservedly so,” he said.

Dickinson also said that by design, there were several ideas the group did not use. They intentionally excluded the typical warnings like puking and keg-party mishaps, and avoided anything too dark or overused like car wrecks.

“This competition is something that students aren’t going to get in the classroom. Even when they take a campaign class, there is still that feeling that it’s a class,” Christy said.

For team member Andrew Barr, this couldn’t be truer.

“This was more than a class, it was a boardroom. The work hours were insane, and to win, we knew we had to take ‘binge’ drinking to a new level creatively, so we did,” Barr said.