District 2 NSAC Results

This past weekend, Bento (or the Ithaca Advertising team) went to NYC to participate in the 2nd District of the National Student Advertising Competition. We have been working all semester on this campaign, which is for the Century Council (Anti Binge Drinking). This day of district two, after two teams dropped out, had nine schools competing.



After working together this entire semester, it was such an amazing feeling to present our ideas to this great set of judges. The judge panel included the founder of People, Ideas and Culture, an Exective Creative Director from Publicis, as well as a member of the Ad Council, a woman from Ogilvy and a media guy from another one of the big agencies. When it came time to present our ideas, it went over incredibly well. Than it was time for the Q&A section with the judges.

While the member of the Ad Council had one question, none of the other judges had any questions. They just told us how amazing out campaign was and how refreshing it was to not be any form of scare tactics. While most teams had the full 10 minutes taken up by questions and inquiries, ours lasted approximately a minute and a half.

Than three hours it was time to hear the results...Although not as high as we wanted, we got third. With Pace coming in at second and Syracuse taking the win. I wasn't extremely impressed with either campaign, but whats done is done.

Working as an agency, we did an AMAZING job. A great group of people, a refreshing non-profit client to work with, and so many other things made this class the best I have ever taken. It reminds me why I chose my major and why I want to do what I want to do. If anyone out there reading this wants to see our work, just let me know and I can send it out. At the same time, I received a great amount of contacts while doing this. And hopefully I can transition that into a job once I graduate next summer.

I still want to work for an ad agency as a junior art director once I graduate. So much fun. But I have another ad lab left, and hopefully we put together as good a campaign next year as we do this year. But it will be a new group of people and a new client, so we will see what happens.

Wetsuit Design

For our final project for Brand Design, we have been assigned to create an annual report and an alternative design project for our brand. My brand, Atlantis Diving, a custom dive shop, has been a lot of fun to work with this semester. And for the final project I have decided to create the staff wetsuits for our company. My first venture into fashion design.

At this point, I actually would love to be able to design my own wetsuit.

Man Scented Candles

Last year I did a campaign for a fake company called Mandles, which is manly scented candles for men and perhaps the craziest creative concept that I ever put to ink. My attempt was to create a little bit of driving force to purchase because I believed this was such a novelty product. So I created a two sided ad campaign where the dotted line is perforated to create a coupon to create that driving force, as well as a sort of viral aspect to it because people can pop them out and either collect them or trade them.







Modernista! Here is the craziest idea I've ever done for the creative intern application.

Risk. A World of its Own.

I did a campaign last year for class and have been battling myself over whether this print campaign has any real promise or if it is just very...student work. I tried to give Risk a new look with males 18-24 by showing the energy and passion that goes into Risk when you play. It is not just a board game, but it is its own world. I showed this to an AD at Saatchi and Saatchi and he sent me a link to the award winning campaign for Risk that had the invaders occupying a major landmark of another country. Fantastic idea.

Any and all comments are welcome. In my opinion, the visual stand out a lot, especially when compared to a lot of other ads. But I am just not sure about them, whether they would be looked at as purely student work or not. Now I need to stop procrastinating and study for the remainder of my midterms, which include: Principles of Marketing, Brand Design and 20th Century American Drama.

Discovering the Undiscovered

So I think I have finally finished my campaign for Atlantis Diving. Well, as much as I will ever consider it finished, I will always find flaws in my own work that need to be corrected. But here are all three, tell me what you all think. Any and all comments are welcome.

Just for class purposes I have to do a different layout on the moon piece, but I think the campaign is at a good point at this time. I do want to keep working on it and updating it so it will be good enough to go in my book eventually.

Dying to be Thin

Sophomore year I did advertising for a theatre performance titles 'Dying to be Thin'. This was a one woman show about a woman suffering from bulimia and was a very moving show. It also happened to be directed by my girlfriend. When I did this show, I sort of took a different approach to the conventional theatre poster and created a campaign for it. I took lines out of the show and gave them characters. Seven in all. All of them had different themes and feelings, characters that were prevalent in the scene I had chosen. I wanted people to see all of the different emotions that afflictions like bulimia could have on a person. Although it was a one woman show, I created some of the characters as men so as to reach a broader audience. I don't know if I could ever put these in my portfolio being as they are not typical ad pieces, but I really like the idea I had and we attracted 320 people to two performances with maximum space of 400 total. This was for a performance associated with no theatre group on campus. We actually out earned all of the other student theatre groups who usually ran for three or four performances.

Any comments are welcome on these.

My Work and the Mi'kmaq Nation

There are a bunch of things I love about Ithaca, but this is one of its huge faults. Ithaca is not a school for creatives in advertising. It's fantastic for the business of advertising, PR and marketing, but it does not have the classes or facilities designed to help students who want to go into creative. So I have sort of taken it upon myself to take as many design classes as I can, even repeating a few where I get to create campaigns, as well as designing my own senior workshop for creative portfolio development. So I have worked on a few campaigns for brands thus far, including: Fresca, the NFL, Risk, Mandles (fake candle for men), Atlantis Diving (fake custom scuba shop), and a few random pieces here and there. I'm going to put up one piece from my NFL campaign and my Atlantis Diving campaign here and any comments are welcome. I'm not going to explain them because that kind of defeats the point. An ad should be able to be understood by just looking at it. If it needs to be explained, its not good.

NFL


Atlantis Diving


Also, on a random note, I talked to my grandmother because I have been curious about my heritage. I'm taking a native nations class that deals a lot with various nations, predominantly the Haudenosaunee, or the Iroquois Nation. But my grandmother informed me I do have a little native heritage on her side from Maine and Nova Scotia. I talked with my professor and learned that that is 95% certain the Mi'kmaq. I think that is so cool, but I just want to learn more about it and I don't know how to go about it. I can look up their history all I want and it's easy, but finding out what they are up to now I think would be extremely interesting.