Ad majors raise alcohol awareness

When SMU senior advertising majors were given the opportunity to put their advertising knowledge into effect, how could they turn it down?

One month ago, John Sanger, director of SMU’s Center for Drug and Alcohol Abuse prevention, presented advertising professor Patricia Alvey with a proposition: to create an original advertising campaign for alcohol awareness. Thus, the “Eight Team” was created.

Alvey asked her advanced portfolio class, made of up eight seniors, to tackle the task – and they accepted.

To begin the project, the team did much research. First was a packet of anti-drinking and alcohol abuse campaigns from all over the nation Sanger provided. After seeing the blandness and conformity of the ads, the students set out to create a campaign that had never been done before. The team desired a final outcome that was representative of the entire class, and their skills as advertisers.

The first step to making an ad was to come up with a statement – something they wanted to get across to SMU students. The “Eight Team” decided upon a mission. The final result would be engaging, relevant, humorous and smart.

From there, the class broke into teams and created four different genres for the campaign, including humor, icons, heroes, and nursery rhymes.

Next, the first drafts of the ads were put to the test in Alice Kendrick’s advertising research class. Sixteen students, male and female, representing all age groups on campus, surveyed Eight Team’s work, and presented them with honest critiques of their work.

“The reaction was very positive,” Alvey said. “The [surveyors] were very helpful in telling us what was effective and what needed improvement. The best part was that none of the ads was rejected.”

After a little fine tuning and slight design changes, the ads were ready to go. Tuesday, the “Eight Team” met with the Social Norms Committee and professionals in the alcohol abuse field in one of the new Belo conference rooms to present their alcohol awareness campaign. The meeting was set up just like one between an advertising firm and its clients would be.

The team displayed each group of ads by genre, explaining in detail the effectiveness of each design. All of the ads were built and executed completely by the class. Team members took their own photos, created logos, designed graphics and drawings and wrote all the fine print copy for each ad.

Robin Barker, a student member of the Social Norms Committee, was pleased with the ads. “We are so glad [the team] was able to do this for us, because we were going to have to use ads from another university.”

Now, SMU’s student-created ads are going to be shown to other universities.

“I love these ads, they’re so non-institutional, and that’s what makes them so great,” commented Lisa Castillo, SMU faculty member in the public affairs department.

“The best things that came out of the campaign were the opportunities for the ‘Eight Team’,” team member Brandon Hampton said. “It was a real-life situation with the deadline approaching. A couple of the other people and I worked from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.”

Jody Shervanick, another team member, added, “Typical of most advertising campaign classes, we spent a late night and early morning at Kinko’s on Greenville.”