A group of University advertising students took first place in the regional round of the National Student Advertising Competition, a project created by the American Advertising Federation.

The competition, which took place in Southfield, Mich., a suburb of Detroit, April 19 and 20, included 17 area universities such as Michigan State University, Indiana University and DePaul University.

Each year the National Student Advertising Competition chooses a corporate sponsor to present a case study of its product’s history and existing advertising situation.

Students must research the product and its competition, identify potential problem areas and create an original integrated communications campaign for the client, according to the competition’s Web site.

This year the competition chose Coca-Cola as the sponsor.

The students involved were given only four rules to follow while making their campaigns. They had to raise the brand consumption and brand health of the product by three percent, target their advertisements to multicultural youth between the ages of 13 and 24, use the tag line “the Coke Side of Life” and keep the cost of the campaign less than its $15 million budget.

“We saw this as kind of a challenge because Coca-Cola is such an established brand, and they have so much tradition,” said Meghan Brattin, co-chair of the University team, junior in Communications and former Illini Media Company employee. “It was hard to come up with something new and different to reach the new target that they had assigned for us.”

The University students used Coca-Cola’s emphasis on unity and tried to tie that together with the competition’s multicultural youth target.

“We figured out what united multicultural youth, and what we came up with was that they live a social networking lifestyle,” said Frank Vanderwall, Illini Media Company employee, co-chair and senior in Communications.

“Our new unity for Coke is basically the social networking lifestyle, which we defined as discovering, sharing and changing your world,” Vanderwall added.

An emphasis on keeping the campaign consistent and tight was important.

“We were constantly making sure every single thing was with our strategy,” said Kim Peterik, co-chair and senior in Communications.

“I think we did a really good job of making our campaign really tight this year,” Peterik added.

The team will advance to the national competition in Louisville, Ky., on June 7 and 8 to compete for the national title.