On Wednesday, April 1, Baltimore's newest marketing agency, Charm City Communications, launched its first campaign for Nissan USA on Homewood campus. But this is no ordinary advertising agency; rather, it is fully staffed by the students of Hopkins's Advertising & Promotions (A&P) class.
The students in this 400-level class in the Whiting School of Engineering's Entrepreneurship and Management Department have been chosen, along with students at nine other schools by EdVenture Partners to conduct a marketing campaign on the Hopkins campus advertising Nissan's soon to be released Cube?.
EdVenture Partners is a firm which acts as an intermediary between major national clients and universities, providing support to students as they conduct campaigns funded by the national client on their campus. The winning team will earn $3,000 for their department and have the opportunity to present to Nissan USA's offices in Tennessee.
The students in A&P are conducting a real ad campaign, with constant feedback and supervision not only by EdVenture Partners but by marketing staff at Nissan as well.
"I think this is a really unique experience; you actually have to deliver instead of just writing a paper saying how you would do something or imaging how it might happen," said Katie Zhuang, a senior Biomedical Engineering major with a minor in Entrepreneurship and Management who also serves as Advertising manager for Charm City Communications.
The experience of this class is a unique opportunity to blend the close supervision of the classroom with the hands-on experience of an internship, argues Leslie Kendrick, the professor for the class.
"The experience that students get in this class is as good, if not better, than what they would get in an internship setting. The students have to deal with the full spectrum of responsibilities, from research to budgeting to the event itself. This breadth isn't usually offered in an internship. Especially for the students who act as managers, there's little chance they would have his kind of experience in an internship," Kendrick said.
In some ways this class provides undergraduates with more hands-on experience than a typical internship with an advertising agency would.
"The program is a true marketing campaign, everything the students do requires approval through Nissan. EdVenture Partners acts as a mentor, but the students are ultimately held to the same standards that a real advertising agency would be," Nissan Account manager at EdVenture Shannon Conlon said.
The students have been encouraged by Nissan to use social networking and "buzz" marketing techniques to appeal to the Generation-Y demographic on campus. The theme of the marketing campaign, the "implementation" in marketing terminology, is My Cube, my playground. In recent weeks, the campus has been bombarded with posters, flashmobs, a "Cube man," Facebook events and a plastic piping cube, declaring "This is not a cube."
"In the lead up to the event, we've been trying to raise awareness of the cube. Standards for a number of approaches were explicitly set by Nissan, including using banners, fliers and buzz marketing . . . we're basically running a small-scale version of a real agency," Zhuang said.
The 30 person class, under the supervision of EdVenture partners and Professor Leslie Kendrick, were direct to organize into a marketing agency with various departments, including Advertising, Public Relations, Finance, Research, Strategy and Reports. Students were selected by Kendrick to serve as managers within the firm.
While being quizzed on a formal textbook throughout the first half of the semester, the bulk of the class has been devoted to the Cube campaign. The class has had to brainstorm, conduct pre-event research, prepare and implement the event.
The rigor of a real campaign teaches students not just theory, but the actual practice of what it is like to have to work in business.
The advertising campaign at Hopkins so far has led the class to independently design and produce its own website, a series of posters with a variety of marketing strategies, and mysterious plastic piping on the engineering quad. One student in the class has even taken on the persona of "Cube-man," writing a blog at the advertising Web site, getinandplay.com, and making appearances at a Charm city organized flashmob.
The events on Wednesday and Thursday are teasers for the centerpiece of the campaign, a barbeque co-hosted with the HOP at the Hopkins vs. SUNY Albany lacrosse game this Saturday. Albany and Hopkins are not only competing in lacrosse, but are also both competing in the Nissan marketing campaign.
This campaign is the fourth year that Hopkins has worked with EdVenture Partners to bring a real campaign to campus. In the past, Hopkins students have done campaigns for Sapphire Mobile, the FBI and the Navy. Last year, in a competition to conduct a marketing campaign to recruit medical students to the navy, Hopkins was selected as the winner and student were able to present to senior naval officers.
"It has definitely helped to launch careers for a lot of students, helped build portfolios and resumes," Kendrick said.
