The National Advertising Challenge is a competition where students enrolled in advertising, design or marketing courses at any Canadian college or university can submit a campaign idea based on a creative brief created by some of the top brands in the industry.
This year’s student brief was by the popular clothing retailer RW&CO. Emphasizing the brand’s move toward greater sustainability, competing students were tasked with creating a campaign to showcase this important element.
Among all of the applicants this year, we are proud to announce that students in our Advertising - Creative & Digital program, Mohammed (Hama) Omer and Anurag (Anu) Arya took home silver for their campaign idea and designs, “Dark is Light”.
Hama shares, “We were thinking of a unique approach to create a sustainable campaign for RW&CO and were hoping to move beyond the cliches. Then, we landed upon something which gave us a rough direction.” Anu adds, “I got reminded of factory outlets that I had seen back home, and as Hama was chalking up the visual direction, it led us to filter down the idea to a mixture of ideas blended together to create our concept.”
As they began to work on the campaign, Hama and Anu split up the work in order to best emphasize each of their skills. “In classic writer/art director pairing, the writer usually starts off with conceptualization and focuses more on the wording and the grand idea. The art director gives a reality check, of sorts, because we have to present the concept visually. I worked on the copy and explanation, keeping it as brief as possible, filtering out the fluff, and Hama worked his magic with creative design software and brought the visual to life,” Anu explains.
Upon finding out they won silver, Anu says, “I found out first and almost started jumping with joy. Then I got a call from Hama, and he was obviously very ecstatic too. We met up and celebrated downtown however we could with these restrictions. We started feeling more optimistic about our careers.”
As students in the advertising program, both Anu and Hama found the lessons they obtained, as well as their own previous experience, helped throughout the competition process. Anu explains, “Personally, I am completely new to advertising and picked up a lot of new things, especially the vital skill of differentiating between a concept and an execution. That was the biggest factor in helping us make the entry.”
While Hama explains, “I had previous experience at an agency, so I processed what we learnt differently, adding to my own insights. That gave us sort of an edge in this competition, bringing our unique, diverse experiences into it. We also presented the concept to a couple of our professors and got valuable feedback which helped us refine it further.”
Congratulations, Hama and Anu, on this outstanding achievement!
Written by: Alexandra Few