By Tori Lohmann

On February 25, 2021, two advertising campaigns made by Lindenwood students won silver at the American Advertising Awards, formally known as ADDYS. These awards are offered by the American Advertising Federation (AAF). The AAF has 5,000 college chapters across the country and allows students to compete against professionals in the ADDYS. Just in St. Louis, there were 342 entries for the ADDYS advertising campaign, and Lindenwood students, including Mia Tebbe and Kris McKay, won silver with their campaign. The other campaign that won silver was for the Saint Louis Crisis Nursery, a charity that is “focused on helping as many people as possible and supporting families until they can support themselves,” in which advertising students, including Alexa Pressley and Tebbe, as well, started the #ForThem social media campaign to raise money for Give STL Day.

Dr. Kristy Tucciarone, Professor of Advertising and Public Relations, is the one who oversaw both of these incredible projects. Dr. Tucciarone mentions that her advertising class “functions like an advertising agency” and allows students to get a head start in the advertising world by having them compete in nationwide advertising competitions, like the ADDYS. She is “giving students curriculum that will prepare them to work in industry.” Each student chapter of the AAF that participates in the National Student Advertising Competition is given the same client at the beginning of the year and asked to make an ad campaign from scratch for them – a huge opportunity for students to get hands-on experience in the advertising world -- and last year the client was Adobe.

Kris McKay, now a Lindenwood alumni with a BA in Advertising and Public Relations, described the Adobe campaign as a “business-to-business campaign that focused on increasing awareness for a creative software called the Adobe Experience Cloud for Advertising.” McKay mentions that “this award means everything to us,” as her and her team had to finish their campaign at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and had to completely redesign their project to be presented online instead of in-person. Mia Tebbe, who is majoring in Advertising and Strategic Communications, views the shift in the project as “amazing experience to learn how to change and adapt on the fly” and now feels like she “can take on and handle any kind of changes or challenges that could potentially be thrown [her] way.”

Student Alexa Pressley, who is an Advertising and Strategic Communications major, says that winning one of these awards helps her future career because she “will be able to prove that [she] can help [an] agency win more ADDYs in the future, because [she has] already helped win one.” Dr. Tucciarone’s classes offer advertising students great, real-world experience that they genuinely find valuable and beneficial for their futures.

Pressley worked on the Saint Louis Crisis Nursery campaign, which Dr. Tucciarone brought to her Creative Advertising Concepts class. The campaign not only won the silver award, but also helped the charity raise $15,000 for Give STL Day, a day dedicated to raising money for non-profits in the area, which is double what they made the previous year. The communications director at the Saint Louis Crisis Nursery personally thanked Dr. Tucciarone and her team and credited their campaign for part of their major success with Give STL Day.

With professors like Dr. Tucciarone, who encourage students to get involved in the advertising field early on, and students with an extreme amount of dedication and resilience, it is not a surprise that these campaigns won silver at the ADDYS. Through all the “late nights, emergency Zoom calls, and extra, unanticipated work,” these students worked diligently to create campaigns that they were proud of and that deserve the awards they have won this year.

Congratulations to all the students involved in these projects and to Dr. Tucciarone for creating such a strong community in the advertising program!