This past February submitted a three piece print campaign to the Northwest local division of the Student Addy’s, a very prestigious advertising competition. The events that unfolded during this process have created life long stories that are more valuable than any award given.The Student Addy’s is an advertising competition locally organized under the American Advertising Federation, which has a national network of ad clubs nationwide. The competition has three tiers: local, district and national. To date, no students from AiPD had entered the competition and I wanted to put The Art Institute on the map (along with myself).
The campaign consisted on three posters,intended to be a public service announcement for cervical cancer awareness, aimed at young men and women, ages 18-25. This was a project I’d started about four months earlier as a class assignment and with a lot of critique and feedback, it developed into a portfolio worthy campaign. I went to great lengths to make sure the campaign was executed properly.
- Selected the models
- Took all of the photographs
- Art directed the project from start to finish
- Paid great attention to detail in terms layout and design
I was extremely proud of the work I’d completed and there was NOTHING that would stop me from submitting this campaign to the Student Addy’s. Of course, the moment I said that, everything that could go wrong, went wrong.
The day before the deadline:
- my files went corrupt
- my flash drive burned up
- missed the deadline to FedEx overnite
Someone in the print service center at The Art Institute suggested driving to the School of Visual Concepts, located in Seattle, to drop off my submission. Ummm…I’m in Portland and it’s only 3 hours to Seattle…do it or not do it? I figured I’d been through this much turmoil, what’s a few hours on the road? I wanted to see this project through to the end #!&* it!
The next morning I told my work I was sick, cancelled all of my appointments for the day and was on the road by 7:30am with a three hour playlist of jammin’ tunes on my iPod. Did I mention we were experiencing freakishly cold weather here in Portland and it had begun snowing? I didn’t care - I would drive through rain, sleet and snow to get this damn project submitted! And I did - drive through snow -lots of it.
325 miles and nearly 7 hours later I completed my mission. I hand delivered the campaign with an amazing sense of completion. At that point, I didn’t care if I won. Sometimes the journey is more important than the outcome and I learned the true meaning of what it is to be driven.Nearly six weeks later, there was still no word on who had won the competition. Then I got a phone call from my friend (who also entered the competition) asking if I had checked my email, did I read the news about the
Student Addy winners? I nervously checked my email, hands shaking with a million thoughts running through my head. There it was - Gold ADDY Award - Cervical Cancer Awareness PSA - The Art Institute of Portland. I couldn’t believe it, I had actually
won.
