What is The National Student Advertising Competition (NSAC)?

“The National Student Advertising Competition is the premier college advertising competition that provides more than 2,000 college students the real-world experience of creating a strategic advertising/marketing/media campaign for a corporate client.  Each year, a corporate sponsor (client) provides an assignment or case study outlining the history of its product and current challenge. The case study reflects a real world marketing challenge. Students must research the product and its competition, identify potential problem areas and devise a completely integrated campaign for the client. Each student team then "pitches" its campaign to a panel of judges. Judging is conducted by professionals in the advertising, marketing and communications industry. Judges at the national level are selected from the client and their advertising agencies”.

What was Olivia Sims’s Role in The National Student Advertising Competition Spring 2023 Semester?

Each of the AAF's college chapters can form a team for the National Student Advertising Competition on its campus. Olivia Sims was The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s AAF NSAC team’s campaign plans book designer for Indeed [this year’s client]. She designed the plans book during the entirety of the Spring 2023 semester that contained all the campaign research and strategy conducted during the Fall 2022 semester. Sims applied and was accepted as one of the few Creatives who were brought onto the team for the Spring semester to focus on the visual and design components of the campaign. In other words, taking the research/strategy of the campaign and making it visually coherent through design thought processes and creative problem-solving.

Shared below is the NSAC X Indeed plans book designed by Olivia Sims with assistance from NSAC creative director and other creatives. Mood boards and brainstorming notes are also shown below. Additionally, The bottom of this page supplies a PDF of Sims’ work for a Print Ad Assignment for NSAC.

Team 445’s campaign won 2nd place in the district competition on April 27, 2023.

Read the UIUC College of Media article - “Students place 2nd in AAF’s district-wide National Student Advertising Competition” for more.