Shocker Ad Lab students paused, slightly daunted, when a request came in from the Fairmount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences dean’s office. The charge: Produce a short commercial to create awareness of the breadth of liberal arts and sciences disciplines within the college.
To debut at the Oct. 20 volleyball game against Tulsa in Koch Arena.
On the Jumbotron.
“We were all a little apprehensive. I don’t think any of us had ever done something to that scale before,” Madison Murray, script writer and director for the video in Shocker Ad Lab, said. “We’ve all made videos for our own classes, but never anything to the scale of a WSU volleyball game, which was terrifying because it’s going to be up on the big screen.”
Students enrolled in the Shocker Ad Lab course in the Elliott School of Communication tackle all sorts of requests, including print and digital pieces, event planning and branding. Described as a full-service, creative strategic ad agency, students in the class get applied learning experience ranging from concept creation to copy writing to production.
“Moving up to a storyboard-shot video with editing and all that was a bit of a jump,” David Williams, production assistant for the video, said. “It was a welcome jump because it was pretty enjoyable to do and it was a bit of a test for our working together as a bigger unit.”
As the team brainstormed how to keep viewers engaged while expressing the complexity of the college, a theme emerged. As a whole, Fairmount College students wear many hats.
Filmed on campus, the commercial features individual students, each wearing a unique hat and stating the major they represent. The video ends with the idea of wearing the best hat of all—a mortar board.
During the experience, Shocker Ad Lab students challenged themselves and enhanced their skills.
“Doing copywriting was originally my plan, and then realizing that we needed a director, I thought I was capable of doing it,” Murray said. “Having that confidence to do it and directing was a skill I learned.”
“This is not a class where students come in and learn how to use InDesign or learn how to run a video camera and edit in Premiere,” Madeline McCullough, the instructor, said. “They come in with skills and we put them to work for clients. Everyone identified what they were good at and decided who did what.”
Work done by students since the lab’s 2015 inception has resulted in numerous awards from the National Federation of Press Women and Kansas Professional Communicators.
“I’ll be submitting this video to the 2024 communication contests,” McCullough said. “The students came up with a fun solution to a complex problem of how to represent the 18 academic departments that fall under Fairmount College.”