2022 NSAC\AAF
National Student Advertising Competition
For my last semester of college I was required to take a portfolio class. The Professor recommended that a group of us join the Advertising Club, Red 176, to work on the American Advertising Federation (AAF) ran competition, the National Student Advertising Competition (NSAC).
I joined, and along with a few other students we proceeded to complete our campaign in a month, and presented our plans to the board of judges in Toledo, OH. We were awarded Third place in districts.
Here is our campaign and process:
First Things First... Research
We created a survey for our target audience covering a large range of questions, including:
What are your feelings towards VR?
How familiar are you with using VR?
Could you see VR being a helpful studying tool?
How do you feel about the company Meta?
Along with other questions to cover their knowledge on VR and the company.
We gathered our information through nearly 300 respondents from our college. With the survey, outside research, and our team falling into the generation age range (16-24), we had the information needed to begin our brainstorming...
Our brainstorming session where we gathered our own idea's on what we thought would be interesting to do with VR and tried to come up with a "big idea" for our campaign.
The target audience for this campaign is Gen Z, specifically those leaving high school or in college.
Our generation is the most diverse when it comes to backgrounds, beliefs, and lifestyle, so we are kinda hard to fit into a box. Because of this we segmented our market into three categories based on their familiarity with Meta Quest and virtual reality.
After discussing the results
Based on our results from the survey and our research, we knew that there was an opportunity to expand on how our audience see's the VR experience.
Our other objectives were to showcase the community that VR can bring to the college environment, increase engagement in programs on college campuses, and those programs can then be used to incentivize users and creators to publish online reviews.
The online reviews would lead to engagement on platforms, and lead to an increase in KPI's (Key Performance Indicators).
We broke down our target market and developed three persona's that we could refer to when making decisions for the campaign...
The incoming freshman is both new to college and virtual reality. They don’t see the diversity of usages outside of gaming, and are missing out on the opportunities that the Meta Quest 2 could offer them.
The seasoned student has had some experience both in class and with VR. This person has a basic understanding of VR, and has used a quest headset a couple of times, however he is on the fence about purchasing one for himself.
The tech enthusiast is an early adopter of virtual reality, so they know what it's capable of, and won’t take much convincing to reward themselves with a meta quest headset of their own.
How do
we reach our
target market?
We split up our media strategy into the PESO method (Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned). This would organize what we had covered through our media strategy in order to reach our campaign objectives. Knowing Gen Z, we knew the biggest tool we could use to reach them would be social media. We chose short form video’s because through research it was found that it performed best with Gen Z.
While social media would drive our reach and would help our KPI's, we also wanted to ensure that there were in-person interactions on college campuses with our target audience. With in-person interaction it would ensure that there was a space for students to get a well rounded understanding of what they can accomplish with VR. That is where our Azimuth program would come in to help.
We set our designated market areas for where the campaign would begin, and that got us an estimate of what percentage of the target market we could reach.
The AIDA Method
After deciding the types of media that we wanted to use to reach the audience, we then decided to go back through and define the purpose that each of our media plans serve.
When trying to connect with a target market, you always want to meet your consumer where they are at. We know that the Meta Quest has three potential media consumers so we decided to organize our campaign ideas using a consumer purchase funnel (seen above).
This funnel tells the consumer journey from brand/product awareness, all the way to the call to action, which in this case is purchasing a headset. Using the AIDA model we separated our plans into four different intentions: Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action.
Now let's get creative
Along with having the strategy and research to back up our campaign, we also had to have creatives to go along with it to showcase what the campaign could look and feel like.
This video was used to show what our social media campaign could look like.
Shot and Directed by: Jared Kunish
Edited by: Elissa Akers
Azimuth
This video was to be used as a promo to a demo that would be used by the ambassadors for students to have their first sneak peak into what they can do with the Metaquest 2. The Program we named, Azimuth.
Azimuth is an all-in-one interactive space designed specifically with college students in mind. Like Meta’s First Steps tutorial, Azimuth exhibits the immersive qualities of virtual reality, but at a more elevated level for the digital native Gen Z audience. This program will walk our users through the beginning of their VR experience and broaden the horizons of those that have only been exposed to gaming on the Meta Quest 2.
Luckily for us we knew Diego Diaz, a VR creator, who was able to provide us with actual VR content he created to include in the video.
And to add to our luck we had the talented Carley Stone to edit it and put together the promo.
What is Azimuth?
We discussed what program we wanted students to run through with our brand ambassadors and wanted to make it feel like its own experience. Not just to learn, but for students to enjoy. We landed on the name Azimuth because it relates to VR in its definition.
Azimuth: the direction of a celestial object from the observer, expressed as the angular distance from the north or south point of the horizon to the point at which a vertical circle passing through the object intersects the horizon. This is the same way that VR programs are developed, you are developing around the observer.
We also saw a trend within the company, Meta, and other tech companies, using science oriented lingo for their branding. To us, as soon as we came across Azimuth, we knew it was the perfect name for our program.
End Result:
Madison Whittle; Club President and Creative Lead (left), Elissa Akers; Strategy Lead (middle), Carley Stone; Research and Marketing Lead (right)
After participating in NSAC and finishing 3rd in districts, I, along with two other participants in our club received awards. I was acknowledged by WKU's Communication Department for "Outstanding Advertising Club Student".