American Advertising Federation National Student Advertising Competition 2025
Research driven integrated campaign for Gen Z, delivered as a plans book and a live pitch.
Client: AT&T
A 27 Person Team Project at the VCU Brandcenter
Role: Creative Team
Creative, concept development, storytelling, design, and deck build.

BACKGROUND

he AAF National Student Advertising Competition is a nationwide program where university teams build a full campaign for a real client. Each year the client shares a detailed brief with brand context, business challenges, and performance goals. Teams respond with research, strategy, creative, media, budget, and measurement in a written plans book and a timed live presentation with Q and A.

For the 2024 to 2025 cycle, the client was AT&T.

THE ASK

Use AT&T’s platform line, “Connecting Changes Everything,” to grow brand love and relevance with Gen Z and drive desire and preference for AT&T.

Our team needed to:

Ground the idea in real Gen Z behavior and contradictions
Build one clear organizing idea that could flex across social, creator, experiential, and media
Prove that idea with reach, frequency, and cost logic tied to AT&T’s brief
Package everything in a judge ready plans book and a twelve minute live pitch

RESEARCH AND STRATEGY

Research showed that Gen Z feels indifferent toward phone providers and often cannot tell brands apart. The line “Connecting Changes Everything” felt functional until it was paired with AT&T’s purpose and real emotion.

We focused on:

The category problem

Most respondents saw phone providers as interchangeable. When we asked for word associations, the language around each brand was almost the same. “Connecting Changes Everything” on its own also felt flat; some people thought it just meant texting.

The core tension

Gen Z knows they spend too much time on their phones, but also says most of their meaningful connections start there. They want to disconnect without losing distance from their online life.

From there, our strategy was:

Define the target audience as “The Unpredictable”
A Gen Z audience that embraces contradictions: wants to go out and stay in, scrolls for hours yet dreams of doing more, collects interests across music, gaming, travel, fashion, and niche hobbies.
Position AT&T as the bridge
Not just the signal on the screen, but the thing that quietly connects their online starting points to what happens in real life after.
Build the idea: “&Beyond”
A campaign that lives under “Connecting Changes Everything,” using AT&T’s ampersand. Each line starts with an interest (Music, Travel, Gaming, etc.) and finishes with “&Beyond” to show how far that connection can go, online and offline.

This idea then shaped a three phase plan: build awareness and consideration, convert, then turn new customers into advocates.

PROCESS AND SKILLS UTILIZED

I worked between creative and design, with a focus on the activation system and how it looked in the room.

Helped translate research into a simple human tension around connection, overuse, and contradiction for The Unpredictable
Co-developed activation concepts like Travel&Beyond and Community&Beyond, then led the visual design for those touchpoints
Art directed environmental branding for campus pop ups, including tents, vehicles, and on site signage that balanced AT&T’s system with partner brands like Airbnb
Designed the photo booth experience for college campuses, including the booth structure, photostrip system, and how the sweepstakes story showed up on site and in social teasers
Built store, social, and out-of-home mockups that showed how &Beyond would appear in real AT&T environments
Helped refine the overall story arc and pacing so the work felt cohesive from research to execution

DELIVERABLES

Plans book

A judge ready document that captured research, target, positioning, the &Beyond campaign, media plan, activation details, budget, and KPIs.

Final presentation

A live pitch that walked through the brief, Gen Z insight, The Unpredictable target, the &Beyond idea, three phase media and activation plan, and how success would be tracked.

OUTCOME

Testing through a national survey showed that the work shifted how Gen Z viewed AT&T.

83 percent of respondents found the spots appealing, clear, and believable
Consideration for AT&T increased by 63 percent
Purchase intent rose by 10 percent

The media plan projected about 9.8 billion impressions for the Gen Z audience while staying under budget, driven by social, programmatic, streaming, campus and travel activations, gaming, music, and out-of-home.

The project strengthened my understanding of how research, strategy, and execution align in a national jury setting, and it pushed me to grow my cross functional collaboration and creative problem solving under real constraints.

Check out the plans book here
Check out the full presentation here

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