Under Armour Listens to Loyola Students

By Katherine Bigley

Loyola’s senior advertising capstone seminar each year takes an ordinary presentation assignment to a more professional level. Students at Loyola no matter what their major is usually are required each semester to do a presentation at some point. From theology to biology these presentations are pretty consistent in writing a report then organizing a PowerPoint presentation to the class about a topic.

These tedious presentation requirements have been adapted for communications students in order to prepare them for more scenarios faced in the “real” world.The advertising senior capstone focuses on students presenting an authentic, advertising pitch to a client. The client for this semester’s class is Under Armour, which presented the objective about creating a new advertising campaign targeting active women ages 18 to 35.

For the semester, students work together like a real advertising agency, in order to achieve this objective by providing a professional presentation to the client. The presentation is not just a PowerPoint, but rather a plansbook laying out the strategies the agency would recommend for the company to follow. The plansbook includes research on the situation, the industry/ company overviews, potential ad campaigns, storyboards of television and online commercials that would be put into effect, and finally where the advertisements can be placed efficiently and effectively to reach these active women.

“It’s a lot of hard work, especially working in teams, but overall we believe the client will be happy with what we have been working on,” says Lauren Lhotsky, senior student in the class. “I would recommend this capstone class to anyone interested in going into the advertising world. You learn so much as to what a real life agency is going to be like. Also it is great to have the plansbook, to bring to interviews for potential jobs.”

If the class was set up to present to not a “real” client, students may not put as much effort into it. However, the class has been working on this project since the second day of class and will not stop until their presentation on December 13. Utilizing all the student’s talents from working with graphics to creating the advertising copy, everyone is finding their job that they can excel in. The class teaches the fundamentals needed for students to pursue careers in advertising, such as working as a team, thinking creatively, and utilizing a budget, all which are in the end supposed to satisfy a client’s objectives.