Advertising students succeed in global competition

Sneakers and some nice suits is all it took to garner a group of FIU students worldwide recognition. 

In the recent International Advertising Association’s (IAA) InterAd Competition, advertising students from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication placed second in their efforts to help web-portal Yahoo! reach out to teenagers.   

Wondering how the sneakers and the suits come into play? Well, the team calls itself Sneakers and Suits Communications.

“It’s a reflection of their style,” said Catherine B. Ahles, chair and associate professor of advertising and public relations. “They consider themselves hip business professionals.”

InterAd is the International Advertising Association’s annual student advertising competition. It aims to provide university students from around the globe the opportunity to gain hands-on marketing experience. This year, the project involved creating a marketing solution for Yahoo! A total of 39 teams from 25 schools across 16 countries competed. 

“We don’t have a history of participation in this competition so to compete and place this high makes us absolutely delighted and so proud,” said School of Journalism and Mass Communication Dean Lillian Kopenhaver. “This was a team of highly talented and well prepared students.”

In order to qualify for the international challenge, a team must win the regional competition. Sneakers and Suits, FIU’s team, competed against the nation’s major universities and placed first in the regional competition, which included the United States and Canada. The team then automatically moved into the international competition. 

Ahles teaches Integrated Marketing Communications Campaigns, a course in which students form communications agencies, find a client and pitch a campaign idea to them. Sneakers and Suits took the course in the spring and in three months put together a class project and entered it into the competition. 

“It was the most creative project I’ve ever seen, hands down, in terms of both their solution to the problem and the graphics they developed,” said Ahles.  The team even carried their theme through to the end by wearing sneakers and suits to the actual final presentation, said Ahles.

Faculty adviser Rosanna M. Fiske led advertising majors Joann Chea, Everett Guerny, Melissa Gutierrez and Paola Lopes and public relations major Stephanie Leavitt to victory. The team members graduated in May shortly after submitting their proposal.

The purpose of the project was to create a campaign that would draw the attention of teens to web-portal Yahoo! Sneakers and Suits based its proposal on research conducted among South Florida teens ranging from 13 to 17 years of age. 

“The entire project was backed up by research that pointed to exactly what would motivate people in the target age group,” said Fiske. In the end, the team developed the idea of a rewards program that gives teens a gift when they sign up to use any of the Yahoo! services. 

“FIU's Sneakers & Suits Communications did an exceptionally fine job interpreting today's American teens,” said IAA Director of Educational Programs & Alliances John Holmes.  He noted that based on their research, the Sneakers & Suits multimedia campaigns, complete with highly creative messages that reward viewers, should resonate well with the target audience.

Sneakers and Suits fell just behind the Kajulu Communications team from Australia, and was followed by Egypt in third place, Colombia in fourth and Turkey in fifth.

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