During my first semester as a senior, I decided to participate in a competition put on every semester by Ithaca College's chapter of the American Advertising Federation.
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The competition, called Creative Crunch, takes place over four hours, and allows for students to join a team to create advertisements for a client that is announced during the competition. Each team receives a creative brief that explains the brand, their demographic, and what they're hoping to gain from the ads. Then each team must create two print ads and choose a third way to advertise the brand.
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The client for the Fall 2018 was Marshmallow Fluff. The company wanted to emphasis families and having a good time eating Fluff. Our group decided to do a two-page magazine ad featuring a sandwich. One page would feature a slice of bread with a peanut butter, and the other page would feature bread with fluff, so that when the pages came together, they would create a "fluffernutter" sandwich.
We brainstormed as a group and decided to draw an activity that a family could do together — a swing set in the first ad — in the fluff using photoshop and an iPad draw tool. My job was to help gather photos that we could use for the ad — the picnic table background, bread slices, peanut butter spread, etc. — and then oversee its production in photoshop by our creative team member.
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Our second ad featured the same concept, but instead of a swing set, we drew a pool with a splash, and used Nutella instead of peanut butter. For our last ad, we decided to use a subway car window so that we could have a similar moving/interactive effect as the print ads. Since the car doors come together instead of flipping on top of each other, we brought a bubble wand together with bubbles that were drawn in fluff on a slice of bread with peanut butter.
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I had never experienced something like this, but I enjoyed helping manage a team to perfect a concept.