For the past four years my brain has been filled with talk of Oregon as a leader of conceptual thinking and more specifically the advertising program’s approach to branding and creating strategic work. And for the past four years I’ve taken all of this talk with a grain of salt, under the assumption in this creative and competitive industry, other schools are on the same page.
Apparently this is not the case. We’re different than other schools and believe it or not, this school, our program and groups like AHA and Ad team are making us- dare I say- indispensible.
Let me tell you a story.
University of Oregon’s ad team, or Upstream Advertising as we’re known on the street, joined nine other student teams in Spokane, Washington this past Friday to compete in the District 11 Regional’s for the 2009 National Student Advertising Competition.
Our team worked tirelessly for two and a half terms, spending night after night in the Ballmer lab to create a unique and strategic campaign for the Century Council, this year’s NSAC client. We devoted much of this time to discussing strategy and building a brand around a concept: Binge Drinking. We took a broad look at the subject, worked until we understood it in great depth, found our audience and how to speak to them and built strategic ideas for how to change behaviors.
Now, we stood in front of schools from Washington, Idaho, Montana and Oregon, representing not only our campaign and the work we put into it, but also our university as a whole.
As the competition progressed we noted differences between the schools in the district, most notably that the majority of them were marketing programs and a lot of the work looked forced. And once the final presentation of the day was complete one truth became apparent: our school truly does function differently.
We could go into our levels of professionalism (we’re top-notch), passion for our work and the like (we actually believe in what we do), but I’d most like to emphasize our thought process. We’ve been trained to be cautious of advertising, love branding, believe in ideas, see connections, swap DNA and sweat strategy. All of it, everything, has made us smarter more professional students.
The key to our process that makes us stand apart is strategy, because without it you look like you don’t “get it” and you appear to be making things just to make them. Our team’s extensive strategy made for an obvious contrast from other teams and the judges noticed.
[Unfortunately having great ideas and strategy won’t win you competitions and that’s a whole separate topic of production skills- something our school knows needs improvement.]
Back to it.
So be strategic, conceptual thinkers! I believe the shift we’re experiencing towards a more creative, thoughtful and positive advertising industry stems from this kind of conceptual thought. It’s easy to get jaded about advertising and think that most of the work out there is garbage, because quite frankly it is. But if we continue to push the strategy and conceptual skills and lead other student organizations by example we have the potential to a) get jobs despite a rough market and b) change the way people view advertising.
We should be excited by this and work diligently to show the same kind of presence during our trip to New York next month.
-David Zavertnik
