Marketing students win advertising award

A marketing class at the University of New Mexico Anderson School of Management took home a first-place award in a competition to create the best advertising campaign. 

The class created the “Made You Look” campaign to promote the Acura ILX, a luxury sedan. The class’ campaign beat out around 20 schools and garnered over a million impressions on social media, according to one of the class’s instructors, John Bendavidiz. 

“We’ve been doing this forever, I think 14 years now we’ve been doing these competitions, and so I feel fairly confident in saying this is the best campaign any class has ever produced,” Bendavidiz said.

Bendavidiz added that the Acura executives that gave the award were impressed by the classes’ use of research and data to support their project. The video’s high quality of production was also a measure of their  success, according to Bendavidiz. 

“They also showed the change in awareness, the change in purchase consideration, from before the campaign to after the campaign,” Bendavidiz said. 

Members of the class gave presentations of their campaigns, showed their, videos and data in an in-person meeting with Acura executives in May. 

“It was really nerve-racking,” Adam Biederwolf, a member of the class and President of the Associated Students of the University of New Mexico said. “That’s why we had to practice so much and really had to remember our lines to where it was like second nature.”

Biederwolf said while the final presentation was trying, the class was confident in their material and the data. He said they were expecting to earn at least third place.. 

This 2019 award surpassed a 2016 award, when another class placed second in the Acura ad campaign challenge. 

“The great thing about this class is that students are doing all the activities that a real ad agency would do. So they’re learning all the different phases, all the different steps in running an ad campaign,” said Nick Flor, another of the class’s teachers told the  Daily Lobo in an earlier interview. 

Justin Garcia is the Editor-in-chief of the Daily Lobo. He can be contacted at editorinchief@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @Just516garc.