Students compete for $10k advertising prize
Advertising students, from left, Caitlin Vollum, Victoria Hoang, Sunaynna Venkatesh and Jodi Harvey hope to get enough votes from the public to move on to the next round and win the ASC competition.
BY JENNIFER STIENSTRA
Four Sheridan students are hoping to take home $10,000 in the Advertising Standards Canada Public Service Announcement competition.
The group is made up of students in their second year of the Advertising and Marketing Communications program. They are Victoria Hoang, 22, Jody Harvey, 19, Sunaynna Venkatesh, 25, and Caitlin Vollum, 21.
They had learned of the opportunity when they went to Adweek, an annual event held for advertising students.
“Someone from the ASC was actually there and because they were in a room full of advertising and marketing students, it was a good opportunity for them to promote [the competition] obviously,” said Venkatesh.
For the competition, the students had to create public service announcements for different media to warn consumers of manipulating and exaggerating advertisements.
Overall, there were 39 submissions.
For the group, the hardest part was coming up with an original, creative idea for the advertisement.
“There’s a lot of steps in terms of picking the right way to go with our idea and really just finding a way to make it individual and standing out from what other teams would do because you want to win,” said Vollum.
Hoang added that it was especially difficult for them to come up with an idea that ASC hadn’t done before.
Their idea centres on how advertisements hypnotize and manipulate customers.The television ad features a woman with a crystal ball, while the radio PSA has a man putting the consumer under hypnosis.
ASC advertises at Sheridan, with their advertisements appearing in the bathrooms of the school, said Hoang.
“We all see them obviously so we kept thinking of things that they had posted before and so it’s all so hard to get away from that because it’s already in your head.”
Another challenge they had to face was coming up with an idea that would work on all media and still connect together.
“Even if we had a really good idea, it would only [work] for something like a print ad on a magazine and we couldn’t extend it to the radio or TV, [and] we had to go back and start over,” said Hoang.
Poster submission for the ASC competition.
According to Peter White, the Operations Senior Vice President of ASC and the person who runs the competition, it’s a great way for students in Advertising and Marketing to get experience with working with the ASC.
“[It’s] to [help them] get a better understanding of the nature of advertising self-regulation in Canada,” he said.
“[It allows students] to get out there and get exposure to students, the new and younger generation of advertisers.”
Winning the competition would also give them more credit as students in the field of advertising, said Haong.
“It looks really good on our resumes because it’s a national contest so anybody in Canada has the opportunity to compete in this competition,” she said.
According to Harvey, the group they believe that have what it takes to make it the next round.
“We feel that our idea is good enough to make it to the next round, it’s just getting it out there [getting people to vote]” she said.
Public voting ends on March 31st. To vote, go to www.truthinadmatters.com. Votes can be submitted once a day. Afterwards, judges will review the top 20 contenders.
The winner of the competition will be announced on April 15.
