One Show 2008 Student Client Competition

Back on Thursday, May 8th I had the pleasure of attending something remarkable: 10 teams of college students presented their marketing and advertising ideas for Doritos to actual clients from Doritos as part of the 2008 One Show (student) Client Competition. (Learn more about the pitch here.)

We had a team in the mix (Dan, Laura and Jesse) from MCAD. They were awesome. But they didn't win, alas.

Videos of last year's presentations are available online—including work from more MCADers, so I'm assuming this year's presentations will be available soon from the One Club.

What was remarkable for me was the opportunity to see 10 very distinct takes on one assignment—to "make Doritos advertising that is as iconic as Doritos." Some ideas were design-driven, others were focused on events, others on interactivity. Very, very few were focused on TV spots. It seems the college students already get Bob Garfield's thesis.

But video definitely had its day. Nearly every team presented highly-produced video elements. Half the teams presented more than one finished commercial or video content, some with obvious high-production value (i.e., funding). One team had four spots in their presentation. Lesson learned: It's not that hard to have finished video work in your post-collegiate portfolio.

Quite a few of the presentations had a gimmick, like presenting as if we're watching an MTV News broadcast from the future about the outcome of some culturally-significant Doritos campaign. Or creating  theater with audience members. All of these approaches struggled—were we to focus on their idea for Doritos or their presentation of themselves?

Aside from the work our MCAD team presented, I thought two ideas really stuck out.

A team from the Bergh School of Communication in Sweden had a really solid strategic idea: The bag is filled with things you love, wouldn't it be great if the rest of life could be like that? So they developed a web content and widget campaign that used a kind of ad-blocking software to allow users to replace banner ads with content they prefer. Ads for Doritos blocking other ads! Genius.

I wish I could recall the winning team's school. (No luck yet at the One Club site. Look under the left column navigation for "One Show College.") Their tagline and strategy weren't my favorite, but their execution was smart: Redesign the package. They started in the store, and saw an opportunity to help the product stick out more. Then they elevated that work with motion sensor-triggered audio "crunch" cues. You walk down the chips aisle, or past a Doritos bus shelter, and a tasty "crunch" sound reinforces the new packaging. Smart thinking.

There were a lot of really intelligent ideas presented. And it was good that the students got to watch each other present. Of course, the big winner was Doritos. They got all kinds of useful insights, market data and spec creative out of the day. Now, will they have the smarts to implement any of it?

Kudos to the One Club for hosting such a marvelous event.