Marketing students sculpt ad campaign

Northern Burlington County Regional High School students create promotions for ceramic art exhibit "Clay in Mind."

By: William Wichert
   Editor’s note: This is the second of a three-part series examining the marketing education class at Northern Burlington County Regional High School.
   Ceramics can be a tough sell, especially when you have a guy like Donald Trump looking over your shoulder.
   A group of Northern Burlington County Regional High School students learned that lesson when they took on the job of promoting the third annual ceramic art exhibit known as "Clay in Mind," scheduled to take place at the high school from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday.
   This endeavor was the third of the four-part "Apprentice"-style project of the school’s Marketing Education classes. Like the business types competing on the project’s namesake television show, two teams of students, the Elite Corporation and the Hungarian Heroes, have been facing off on different tasks and then paying the consequences in the boardroom over the last two months.
   More than a dozen of the original 29 participating students have not made it out of the boardroom, where NBCR Business Administrator Richard Kaz, who represents the Trump persona, "fires" those students who fail to complete the assigned tasks.
   Success keeps bouncing back and forth between the teams. The Hungarian Heroes won the first task of selling T-shirts to support the school’s wrestling team at the regional and state competitions, but the Elite members beat them out on the second task, which involved selling donated items at Columbus Farmers’ Market.
   The Hungarian Heroes then rebounded and became the winners of the project’s third task — creating an advertising campaign for the "Clay in Mind" exhibit, an assignment that measured the students’ use of non-verbal communication, said Ellen Karch, the marketing education teacher who organized the "Apprentice" project.
   "Face-to-face (advertising), it’s more natural," said Ms. Karch. "When you have to communicate with illustrations, colors (and) visuals, that’s different."
   Students from both teams earned 10 points for each of the 23 participating local businesses that displayed their advertisements, but the Hungarian Heroes came out on top because of their winning design of a newspaper display advertisement, which was selected by the Burlington County Times for 60 points, and their design of billboards (100 points), two of which can be seen on Route 206 in Mansfield Township.
   Bobbi Schneider, account executive for Cherry Hill-based Interstate Outdoor Advertising, which selected the Heroes’ billboard design, said the deciding factor was the team’s banner slogan: "Got Clay?"
   "That would attract anybody’s attention," said Ms. Schneider. "’Got Clay?’ is far more popular, interesting and intriguing."
   As the company’s sales department saw it, she said, the Hungarian Heroes’ design of a cow and the "Got Clay?" slogan followed one of the key strategies of outdoor advertising.
   "It’s called ‘Keep it simple, stupid.’ It’s the KISS theory," said Ms. Schneider. "The purpose of outdoor advertising is not to give them (customers) every detail of information. It’s to get them to want to learn more."
   High School senior Rene Taggart of the Hungarian Heroes team said the winning slogan just came out of thin air. "We were just all sitting around, thinking about what our headline would be, and someone popped out with ‘Got Clay?’" Rene said.
   A participant in the "Clay in Mind" exhibit for the two previous years, Rene said she hopes her team’s advertising efforts will bring attention to an event that otherwise might go unnoticed. "I think, if you’re not into clay, you’ll just look right by it," she said.
   Pat Proniewski, a ceramics teacher and organizer of the "Clay in Mind" event, said the effectiveness of the advertisements remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: many more people know about the event than ever before.
   "One of my hopes has always been (that) our community would support this as an artistic event, an artistic happening," said Ms. Proniewski. "Her (Ms. Karch’s) students have done a great job in flooding local businesses with advertisements. It’s (the event) more visual than it’s been in the past."
   From the 22 high schools statewide participating in the event, 60 pieces of ceramic artwork will be on display and up to 20 students will be rewarded, said Ms. Proniewski.
   While the winning students will then head to an exhibit at Mercer County Community College in West Windsor next week, the nine members of Hungarian Heroes are going on a trip of their own to the Trump Taj Mahal Hotel in Atlantic City.
   As the prize for winning the third task of their projects, the students will travel by limousine on May 4 to the hotel for a tour of a place emblazoned with the Trump name.
   The students still have to complete one more task to decide who will win the project’s ultimate prize of free prom tickets for the four remaining apprentices, but Ms. Karch said she is not giving away any secrets about the final task, in order to maintain the element of surprise.
   "I think it all brings to the forefront the best of the best," she said.