• June 10, 2008

Students from Ohio University were victorious Monday in the American Advertising Federation (AAF) 2008 National Student Advertising Competition (NSAC) where AOL challenged teams to develop an integrated marketing campaign for AOL's Instant Messenger service and its suite of social media products.

"I'd like to congratulate Ohio University for their exceptional creativity and business acumen with the AIM product campaign," said Lynda Clarizio, executive vice president, AOL, and president, Platform-A. "We were very impressed with the keen marketing insights presented by all of the participants, and I've no doubt that these students will make fantastic contributions in their advertising careers."

For nine months, the students conducted primary research to study AOL's target market, including media habits and competitors. The team from Ohio University focused their initial research on how adults ages 18-24 use the AOL Instant Messenger service and its competing social networking Web sites. From there, they were able to determine their objectives and strategies to ultimately design a campaign with the goal of increasing usage by 15%.

The overall creative strategy for Ohio University's campaign was to add tabs to the currently existing AOL buddy list. Each tab would link directly to a different Web site, representing the new facets they wanted to add to enhance AOL's social media capabilities.

The 2008 NSAC judges include the following representatives from AOL: Amy Craig, principal product manager, AIM; Dave George, senior director of communications, marketing and operations; Susan Kim, creative director, Advertising.com; Lisa Lausten, director, marketing, and Kate Wulfing, vice president, marketing.

--Tanya Irwin