This spring, advertising students in Bill Schwab's portfolio workshop competed for an Adobe Stock campaign to showcase their work on IU campuses across the state. (If you haven't heard, IU faculty, students and staff now have access to Adobe Stock, including more than 200 million photos, graphics, and illustrations.)
The plan was for Adobe to choose one campaign, but both teams ultimately won out in the end: The judges found it impossible to choose between them. This fall, IU will feature the students' work across a range of communication channels to raise awareness about Adobe at IU. In the meantime, this video highlights the competition and the approaches the two teams took.
Description of the video:
Adobe has been a long-term partner with Indiana University and along the way we've always looked for new and important and unique ways that we can bring these tools to our students. As of November of 2020 Indiana University is a Creative Campus Pro Campus. What that did is that added Adobe Stock to the contract for all faculty, staff, and students. I was looking for a project that was meaty and interesting and compelling that my students could dive into so voila there we are the wonderful Adobe Stock project came to be. Good afternoon. Welcome to our final presentation on how to be exceptional with Adobe Stock at Indiana University. I think Indiana is probably the most innovative school that we do work with. They're always trying to get faculty and students involved. There's a bit more of an added incentive when they feel like they have people on the other end who are actually looking at their work, evaluating the work, giving them responses, um, that goes beyond the classroom. I love to see how excited they are about this. We thought that the best way to advertise to other students would be to focus on how Adobe, specifically Adobe Stock, makes you exceptional and helps you figure out how you can stand out. We took an approach where we tried to find, like, a key insight as to what do all these students relate to? [video clip: presenter speaking: “This one goes from an image being pixelated to [inaudible] beautiful Adobe Stock image at full resolution.”] and I think that's definitely pushed our campaign forward. [video clip: presenter speaking: “…and then the next one, we took the concept of um you know like a picture's worth a thousand words so we have a long description, transitions to the actual picture of the ocean.”] We were completely blown away um at the student work, um, the the tick-tock videos, the social media ads, the billboards, the artwork, the signage, what they were able to do with stock was incredible. What astounded me about this partnership with the media school and their students was the creative, unique ways that the students provided us with how to build a campaign for students the campaign was so creative and so different and unique and it extended our thoughts beyond what we normally do for promotions of of any type of campaign. What I’d really like the students to take away from this is is a sense of that they've had an authentic experience. They've got some sense of what it actually feels like to be an advertising professional versus a professional college student. This is probably the first time that in an advertising class at least for me that we've had a lot of direction from the client. It's nice to have some guidelines and it's nice to make a client happy. You don't really know what the advertising industry is going to be like when you actually walk into it so having this real experience, getting to work with Adobe and really having this team where you make this great campaign has given me the chance to see what it's going to be like in my future. It's just been incredible the work that the students have done. Just just innovation. I can't wait to see when we create the future. They were able to participate and get feedback from the leading professionals in the field on a variety of topics around social media, marketing, and and they actually were able to take that feedback and make their projects even stronger. That's the type of real world connections we want to create for our students at Indiana University.That's what I hope that they feel like they've achieved in this course, that they're ready, that they realize what they realize they have acquired some skills, and they have a sense of what they have ahead of them, and they feel like they have the confidence now to achieve those next set of goals.
Keep an eye out for the students’ work, coming to IU communication channels this fall. And be sure to check out Adobe Stock in the meantime!