BYU AdLab students Natalie Daelemans, Broderick Danielson and Kyle Lewis have qualified as finalists for the 2015 Collegiate Effie Awards in partner with the Target back-to-college brand challenge.
The Effie 2015 Collegiate Challenge was to make a marketing and communications campaign. The goal of the campaign was to design a plan to engage people ages 18–24 going back to college to shop at Target.
“We spent hours brainstorming, pouring over the research and looking for connections to find what makes people tick,” Daelemans said. “The challenge was to find a way for Target to connect with college students and make shopping with them a memorable experience.”
The 317 and 337 courses got students involved in the Collegiate Effie Competition. BYU students in the classes did research and strategic planning to help brand Target to college-aged students for back-to-school shopping. The 337 class split students up into six teams of three to four students.
BYU Professor Pat Doyle credited Professors Mark Callister and Kevin Kelly with helping organize the research for the project through the Communications 317 course.
The 337 class required students to submit this project to the 2015 Effie Competition as their final project.
“The greatest contribution from the ad program is how it connected all the students, classes and professors,” Lewis said. “I don’t think you can get this type of unity from any other program.”
BYU also had a second team from the advertising program at BYU that made it to the semi-finals of the competition. The team includes BYU students Alex Skinner, Alex Thompson, Brooke Bressler and James Birdsall. This is BYU’s second year submitting work to the Collegiate Effie Competition.
The BYU advertising program took the title last year and is hoping for the same success this year.
“The BYU advertising program has had six semi-finalists and one first place winner over the last two years,” Doyle said. “Not bad.”
The Effie Collegiate Challenge was created in 2009 after the North American Effie Competition. This challenge has given college students an opportunity to hone their marketing and communication skills.
BYU finalists are up against students from the Ringling College of Art and Design. These finalists will be presenting at Target’s headquarters in Minneapolis on May 28.
“Last year students from BYU advertising won the Collegiate Effie Competition for the Mini-Cooper campaign and the National Student Advertising Competition for Pizza Hut,” Doyle said. “This is great for our students; it is huge for their resumes and being recruited.”
