AOF Students Team Up With Local Businesses, Design Online Ads

Now in it’s third year, the “Design an Ad Program” kicked off last week at Fort Lee High School, offering two classes of 9th and 10th grade students in the Academy of Finance (AOF) program the chance to gain real-life, hands-on experience in media and marketing by teaming up with local businesses to see an advertising project through from concept to completion.

Students in the program receive instruction from professional graphic designers and advertising experts about everything that goes into an effective ad. They also meet with their businesses—or “clients”—to gain an understanding of branding and the message being conveyed in an effective advertisement.

The students are divided into “ad teams,” and assigned to one of seven participating local businesses, who provide some instruction on what they’re looking for in an ad, what they’d like to promote or emphasize, and then the ad teams go to work, ultimately producing an advertisement their client can use.

The program was the brainchild of AOF board member and professional business coach Margaret Maclay, who took the idea to AOF program director Linda Farrell a couple of years ago.

“We tried it two years ago, and it was so popular and was such a great experience for everybody that they sort of adopted it into their ‘Intro to Business’ course in the AOF,” Maclay said. “The main purpose of the program is to bring together the community businesses and the students so that they can get some hands-on, real-life experience working with a business.”

The student ad teams were paired up with their clients last Friday, April 29, after some instruction from Maclay on marketing and the “emotional side of advertising” and Ed Burns of mybergen.com, who covered the technical side.

“What’s the purpose? Who’s the target audience and the technical details, including size, colors, how much text,” Maclay said of the instruction the students received last week. “The basic nuts and bolts of how to create a compelling ad for a banner.”

In previous years, students in the program designed newspaper print ads. This year they’re doing online banner ads.

For the past week, the ad teams have been busy, each coming up with three different ads to be presented to their clients Friday, when the businesses come into their class, take a look at what the students have produced and provide feedback and suggestions. The students then have another week to work on their ads until next Friday, May 13, when their clients return to select which of the three ads they want to run.

After “a few little tweaks,” Maclay said, the ad teams formally submit their ads to their clients on May 18.

Maclay says a total of eight ads are being produced this year by two classes—one group of 9th graders and one group of 10th graders—for the following local businesses (with representatives of those businesses in parentheses):

• Chloe’s Gift Pet Photography (Wendy DuBoff)
• Yippee Printing &  Marketing (Marian Gordon)
• Mybergen.com (Ed Burns)
• Allied Financial (Anna Lazar)
• FocalPoint Coaching (Margret Maclay)
• Matisse Chocolatier (Lucille Skroce)
• Fort Lee Chamber (Mirela Tarabakija)

“It’s a real collaboration between students learning about business and local community businesses,” Maclay said. “And the ads in the past have really been quite good. I think everybody was quite surprised. They were something they could actually use.”