After preparing four months for competition, hard work paid off. SMU’s Ad Team won first place in the district National Student Advertising Competition (NSAC) in Austin, Texas.

With the district award in hand, the team will compete in the National Student Advertising Competition on June 6, in Miami.

“It’s like winning the Final Four, and to have won our own district, it’s like being in the Sweet 16,” said Jim Goodnight, interim chairman of the Temerlin Institute of Advertising, as he compared the feat to NCAA basketball playoffs.

The Ad Team also pulled off another feat by winning the competition. It was the second year in a row that the team won the regional competition.

“Two years in a row [of winning districts] is not unheard of, but it’s pretty unusual,” Goodnight said.

Students were extrmely excited with the team’s performance.

“We had been rehearsing for the presentation for about a week,” said Jacobo Perez, Praxis advertising president and advertising major.

Goodnight said he was proud of the team because they were under a lot of pressure after last year’s win.

“When you are trying to follow up on a win, there is just more pressure,” Goodnight said. “It was a much more difficult competition overall, top to bottom. The competition was strong,” he said.

The NSAC College World Series of Advertising is the premier college advertising competition. It provides more than 3,000 college students with “real world” experience by requiring a strategic advertising/marketing media campaign for a corporate sponsor. This year, that sponsor was Bank of America. Each team is judged on presentation and plansbook, each part weighing 50 percent.

After arriving in Austin, the team noticed the environment was tense.

“It was very stressful,” Perez said. “Because I was a presenter, I had that additional pressure on me. I didn’t realize how hard core the other teams were.”

Perez commented on other team’s attitudes.

“There are some schools that have fun trash talking and psyching you out,” Perez said.

SMU was the third team at district to present its 20-minute presentation and 10-minute Q&A. The audience was a group of advertising executives and judges as well as students who were participating in the presentations.

Presentations did not end until late in the evening.

Perez said the room was packed for their presentation.

“People were standing around the room,” he said. “They wanted to see the group that won last year.”

Preparation for nationals is minimal. Last year the team placed third nationlly behind Southwestern State and the University of Wisconsin.

“The whole team is flying out [for nationals],” Evan Horn, senior creative advertising major and ad team member, said. “From now until then, we are going to be really tweaking our presentation, but more or less, the work is done.”

SMU’s Ad Team is comprised of 21 advertising students. They spent the semester preparing for this event under the direction of Peter Noble, senior lecturer at the Temerlin Advertising Instutite.

“I see myself as a coach – not so much as a professor,” Nobel said. “The students use me as a consultant.”

Nobel said he spends 400 to 600 hours a year working with the team and calls it a “labor of love.” It is an unpaid position.

The team’s name is Praxis, which is a medieval Latin word meaning the blending of theory and practice. Everything previously learned in various advertising classes are applied to real-world problems.