Staff’s VR headset marketing campaign earns runner-up end at nationwide promoting competitors » Liberty Information

A crew of Liberty College college students put their skills as expert storytellers and Christian professionals on show throughout one other profitable exhibiting finally week’s Nationwide Scholar Promoting Competitors (NSAC) in Nashville, Tenn. The 15-member crew completed runner-up to Texas Tech College and forward of third-place College of California, Berkeley, among the many eight collegiate nationwide finalists.

Liberty’s crew was made up of scholars from a number of packages throughout the Faculty of Communication & the Arts, together with strategic communication and digital media.

The NSAC is the premier faculty promoting competitors, offering greater than 2,000 faculty college students the real-world expertise of making a strategic promoting/advertising and marketing/media marketing campaign for a company consumer. This 12 months, digital actuality firm Meta Quest challenged 110 universities throughout the nation to create a totally built-in advertising and marketing marketing campaign that might place Quest 2, a VR headset, as a school important.

“The consumer offers groups with a short outlining their communication challenges and the viewers they need to attain via the event of an built-in advertising and marketing marketing campaign,” stated Caitlyn Richard (’17, ’19), an adjunct professor and promoting crew advisor together with graduate assistant Daniel Scicchitano.

Earlier than a single commercial is created, the crew spends the autumn semester targeted solely on analysis – analyzing the market, audience, model, competitor, and product. Analysis initiatives embody every part from focus teams to 1000’s of nationwide surveys, experiential product testing, ethnographic research, and extra.

The analysis ends in key insights that inform the marketing campaign’s central message and technique. This 12 months, the crew’s technique centered round positioning Quest 2 because the factor that takes folks to the person locations they will’t arrive at of their present actuality.

“The spring semester is the place the marketing campaign involves life, producing digital, out-of-home, video, social media, conventional, and experiential commercials to be current of their 20-minute consumer pitch,” Richard stated.

“The whole lot we did was research-backed, and I feel studying the best way to translate actual knowledge into one thing proven to the general public was a tremendous ability to study,” stated senior strategic communication scholar Collin Croom. “It’s most likely been essentially the most enjoyable expertise I’ve had, however it has additionally been the toughest. I’ve discovered an unbelievable quantity all through this, and the relationships I constructed with the crew had been so essential for me.”

Richard stated the competitors, which started final August, offers a real-life expertise that’s the closest college students can get to the skilled promoting world whereas nonetheless in faculty.

“Not like a typical faculty course, the place college students obtain a hypothetical advertising and marketing problem, the NSAC offers college students the chance to work together with a consumer who’s seeking to them for a strategic advertising and marketing answer,” Richard stated. “It prepares our college students for what the client-agency relationship appears to be like like within the business and the best way to develop content material that exceeds marketing campaign targets, not only a catchy thought.”

“I obtained to speak to lots of people from advert companies there, a few of (whom) have been college students within the competitors earlier than, and listening to from them how precisely you’ll be able to switch into the skilled world from (NSAC) actually opened my eyes,” Croom added.

The crew went via three rounds on its nationals run, starting at their district competitors in Raleigh, N.C., and ending in Nashville. The opposite 5 finalists Liberty competed towards at nationals had been Chapman (Calif.) College, East Tennessee State College, College of Kentucky, College of Minnesota, and the College of Oregon.

Croom famous that Liberty’s crew was one of many smallest at nationals by way of membership, with different colleges having over 30 college students every. It was additionally the primary time any of its members had competed.

“It’s not in regards to the variety of folks you have got on the crew, it’s what the folks in your crew are product of,” Croom stated. “Everybody introduced their greatest to the crew.”

The Liberty crew additionally took house the MRI-Simmons Impressed by Perception Award for the perfect software of analysis demonstrated in its NSAC presentation and plans e-book.

This 12 months marked Richard’s fifth as crew advisor, and she or he stated that witnessing the scholars’ progress as business professionals has remained a favourite a part of her job.

“There was this second in nationals, after we left the awards ceremony, ‘The folks you at the moment are, in comparison with the place you had been after we began, are so completely different,’” she stated. “There’s been immeasurable progress of their skilled skills, character, and teamwork, and I’m honored to have been on that journey with them.”

Richard stated creating college students into Champions for Christ, consistent with the college’s mission, is her objective, and she or he took time to talk with the crew about the best way to method their work within the secular world of promoting after commencement.

“Because the advisor, I get to speak with them about what it means to be within the promoting business, which is very onerous as a Christian, and we get to debate how religion intersects with our work,” she stated. “A prayer that the crew has had constantly is that Christ is represented nicely with our work, that we radiate Him via this competitors, and the opposite colleges see that in us.”