BYU’s 2015 second place team included Broderick Danielson, Natalie Daelemans and Kyle Lewis.
A BYU School of Communications’ AdLab student team took second place in this year’s Collegiate Effie competition, beating out more than 75 entries from some of the best programs in the country, to become one of two national finalists.Introduced in 2009 and modeled after the North American Effie competition, the Collegiate Effie is already one of the most prestigious advertising competitions in the nation. It gives participants a chance to create marketing communication cases that address real world challenges for marketers.
With this only being the second year BYU has participated and given the huge success that its teams have had, many students and faculty members expect similar top tier performances in the future.
“Last year, a BYU team took first in the MINI USA Brand Challenge. This year, two BYU teams became semi-finalists and we moved on to the finals,” said Broderick Daniels, a member of this year’s second place team. “BYU’s ad program clearly knows its stuff and is competing at a high level.”
This year’s challenge was for participants to design a plan to engage returning college students (ages 18-24) to shop at Target.
“I feel like we were really prepared for this competition. The things we learned in our account management class really prepared us,” said Daniels. “The judges and Target executives were impressed with our knowledge of certain aspects of the campaign. They thought that we had grasped some pretty tough concepts that are applicable in the real business world of advertising.”
Faculty members Kevin Kelly, Pat Doyle and Mark Callister tried a new approach with this year’s competition. To help supplement the work done in the AdLab, students from Comms 317 (a quantitative research class) provided vital research and data for participating teams, while the teams themselves came from Comms 337 (an account management class).
“The AdLab is an extension of the classroom where the students can apply what they are learning in the classroom,” said Doyle, the AdLab’s Director. “Professor Kelly was the one who drove this success, although I was involved and so was Dr. Callister’s research class which did all of the research for the challenge.”
BYU’s 2015 second place team included Natalie Daelemans, Kyle Lewis and Broderick Danielson. The team which made it to the semi-finals included Alex Skinner, Alex Thompson, Brooke Bressier and James Birdsall.
“We have one of the best undergraduate programs in the country,” said Professor Kelly. “These students are evidence of that and they are quickly becoming our reputation.”