Texas State AAF team 2nd runner-up at District 10 competition

Date of Release: 05/08/2006

SAN MARCOS—The American Advertising Federation team from Texas State University-San Marcos finished as second runner-up at the District 10 student advertising competition in Corpus Christi April 27.

Students from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, communication design and speech communication programs, and the McCoy College of Business Administration marketing department at Texas State made up the AAF team. Texas State was the defending 2005 AAF national champion. Thirteen teams from universities in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and parts of Louisiana presented campaigns created for the 2006 client, Postal Vault, a manufacturer of locking mailboxes.

Southern Methodist University placed first, Oklahoma State University was first runner-up and Texas Christian University was third runner-up. SMU advances to the national competition, while Oklahoma State’s plans book will enter a wildcard competition with that winner also advancing to Nationals in San Francisco.

“The case itself was extremely complex,” said Jody Gibson, advertising instructor and co-advisor of the team. “The fact that the company was privately held and virtually unknown made research and vendor strategies difficult, and the panel of judges at District acknowledged the degree of difficulty of this case. If anything, the students learned a lot about the complexities of working on a client case that threw them a lot of curves and forced many pivotal decisions when advertising an unknown product.”

Presenters for Texas State’s NSAC team were Ben Salas, Dominique LaVista, Andrew Hogan, Nanci Kelley, Antonio Banos, and Ana Kulak, alternate.