For more information, contact John Bennett, (937) 775-3232. 
May 30, 2007 Wright State University students excel in Yellow Pages advertising competition How do you design a Yellow Pages ad that stands out from the crowd and communicates the necessary information to attract customers to your business? That was the challenge for nearly 1,800 students from over 200 colleges and universities nationwide that entered the 2006–2007 Yellow Pages Association Creative Competition. A team of students from the Raj Soin College of Business at Wright State University was one of 11 recognized for their ad design.Judges said the Wright State team of Andy Neumeier, Paul Nieberding and Brian Boggs, students in the Integrated Marketing Communications class taught by Charles Gulas, Ph.D., associate professor of marketing “represented the ideal goal of Yellow Pages advertising: visually creative work that has great potential to break through directory clutter without sacrificing the communication of information likely to be important to the consumer when he or she is about to make a purchase decision.” All the teams were presented a case involving Bella Dental, a fictional dental practice in San Diego. Using the information supplied to them, the students were required to design large and small Yellow Pages ads and an Internet banner. Despite competing with many design program and art students, Wright State’s business students designed winning ads using strong photography, bulleted copy points and an eye-catching block design. “There’s far more information in the case than you can possibly include in a Yellow Pages ad, so then you have to decide what’s worth talking about, how you talk about it, who you should focus on and so forth,” said Gulas. “Our team spent hours considering the target audience and how they might respond to different ad approaches before we even attempted to move forward with the design,” said Nieberding. “I learned that the graphics, layout, copy and header are equally key components in creating an effective advertisement.” The students were allowed to use any images not protected by copyright. Along with designing the ads for the competition, the students submitted a paper to Gulas explaining their strategy for the ads. “Why did you decide to use this kind of image in your ad? Why did you decide to use this in your headline?” were some of the questions the students needed to answer, according to Gulas. “We wanted the ad to have a fresh look, so we used colors, imagery and font styles that conveyed that look,” said Neumeier. “We used the block picture effect, a white background, and kept the ad very simple with clean lines.” “People see the ad and will slowly look diagonally across the ad from the top left to the bottom right so we put all our information on that invisible line that the eye traces,” said Boggs. 
Communications & Marketing
Open Monday - Friday 8:30 a.m. - 5 p.m. 106 Allyn Hall Wright State University 3640 Colonel Glenn Hwy. Dayton, OH 45435-0001 (937) 775-3232 Fax: (937) 775-3235 Com_Marketing@wright.edu |
