New student advertising group starts to take shape

America’s oldest national advertising trade association, the American Advertising Federation (AAF), held an information session on Feb. 27 about the new chapter it is launching on the Homewood Campus. The new chapter will give students, upon paying a $55 membership fee to the national organization, the opportunity to develop professional advertising skills and the opportunity to leverage the AAF network.

Initiated by freshman Clay Zou and sophomores James Koch and Olivia Spector, the chapter will be supervised by Center for Leadership Education Professor Keith Quesenberry, who teaches classes such as Social Media and Marketing and Principles of Marketing as part of the University’s Entrepreneurship & Management program.

“I was in Professor Quesenberry’s class. One day, I went to his office hours and I was asking about other ways to get involved on campus and he told me about AAF. He said that we didn’t have a chapter here, but that it is a really cool opportunity available to start one. It sounded like a really cool idea, and we’ve been working on it since then,” Koch said.

With more than 250,000 members nationally, the new chapter hopes to connect Hopkins students with a wide network of contacts in the field of advertising.

“The thing is that it is a huge organization nationally: There are hundreds of both professional and collegiate chapters. Even though we are just starting the chapter at Hopkins, there are already so many connections, events and resources going on through the AAF that we already have at our disposal,” Koch said.

With a constitution already finalized, the founding members are currently recruiting new members to join the group. The chapter plans to officially launch this spring upon receiving approval from the national organization and the Student Government Association (SGA).

The new chapter is already in contact with the professional AAF chapter in Baltimore, and it has also reached out to Baltimore-based advertising companies such as Planit — whose clients include sports clothing company Under-Armour — with hopes of scheduling tours and thus enabling students to explore advertising in a real-world setting.

“The tours are also really good networking experiences because not only do you meet the people who give the tours, but also the rest of the employees and the staff; you never know who might help you down the road,” Zou said.

In the long-term, the Hopkins AAF chapter hopes to be able to organize free day-trips to New York City to visit larger advertising agencies, attend AFF national conferences and potentially start the University’s own advertising business through the collegiate chapter.

“A lot of collegiate AAF chapters start their own actual advertising business and that is something we would also potentially do in the future,” Zou said.

However, the chapter’s ultimate goal is an opportunity to partake in the AAF’s National Student Advertising Competition (NSAC).

“The whole point of the national competition is to learn how to develop a campaign. From doing market research to background search to establishing a budget, the students must create a campaign for a specific product by following a set of guidelines. Learning by doing is really the best way,” Spector said.

To prepare for next year’s competition, the group is hoping to be able to launch its own Hopkins-wide competition, modeled on the national competition’s guidelines.

“We don’t think we will enter that this year because it is very soon, but we do want to try to organize an inner-Hopkins competition, our own competition, and follow the guidelines that they use nationally to get some practice into that,” Spector said.

Zou echoed that statement.

“It would mostly be like a mock competition to give us some sort of exposure to what the actual guidelines would be,” Zou added.

In addition to participating in the national competition, AAF members are thinking about hosting workshops on campus, to help students learn how to use software such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign.

Spector also noted the many networking events put on by the organization, including career fairs; the AAF has held career fairs in New York City and Chicago in the past two months.

“It is just another opportunity to go out there and build connections,” Spector said.

Quesenberry, who participated in NSAC when he was in college, highlighted the networking opportunities opened up by the AAF, noting that these the career fairs are useful for entering into the advertising sector.

“Even if marketing isn’t what you want to go into, it is really important to learn how to present a message. So it is a really valuable skill that you can get out of this. Ultimately it is up to what the people who get involved want to get out of it,” Koch said.