This year, two teams of five Temple University students participated in the Collegiate ECHO Marketing Challenge, hosted by  Marketing EDGE (Educate, Develop, Grow, and Employ), a national, nonprofit organization working to educate and provide professional opportunities to marketing students. The competition gives undergraduate and graduate students a theoretical budget for a real company and asks them to create successful marketing campaigns for new product launches.

Different brands sponsor the ECHO event every year and students are asked to create a marketing campaign for the Collette Travel Company, the sponsor of the event. Students had a theoretical budget of $5 million for their campaign.

There are two competitions per school year, one in the fall and one in the spring. Students were asked to submit their campaign proposals by Dec. 12 for fall submissions and May 15 for spring. Projects are reviewed over the summer and the winners are notified and announced by Aug. 31.

Temple had one team representing it in the fall and another in the spring. In the end, Temple’s teams were awarded both gold and silver, earning $3,500 for their accomplishments.

Advertising majors Ioanna Dinoulis, KLN ‘18, Allison Doumith, KLN’ 18, Robin Goffman, KLN ‘17, Jonathan Neikam, KLN ‘17, and Toni Sichel, KLN ‘18, were members of the team awarded gold in the spring and Claudette Arter, KLN ‘18, Alicia Cassey, KLN ‘17, Zoe Rasmussen, KLN ‘17, Hiro Soga, KLN 17, and Kalista Wedman, KLN 17, were the silver winners from the Fall submission.

“As the competition gained intensity, my team and I pulled all-nighters and spent countless hours with one another in an attempt to ensure every last detail of our campaign was perfect,” said spring team member and gold winner Toni Sichel.

“The students drive the project,” said assistant professor in the Department of Advertising and PR and faculty advisor Allison Ebbecke. “My role as the faculty advisor is to guide them throughout the marketing research process.”

Ebbecke said students typically spend several hours outside of the class for team meetings, additional research and adding new ideas to their campaign.

“Working with such a talented group of individuals made it easy to produce quality work and send it a final product that made all of us, as well as Temple’s advertising department incredibly proud,” Sichel said.

Gold-winning students also noticed that Collette used one of their ideas by releasing a travel quiz to help future travellers figure out their “travel style” and decide upon their future destination.

“Temple’s results in the ECHO Competition over the past three years [are] a testament to the caliber of the students found at Klein College,” Ebbecke said. “[W]hile the university’s reputation is burnished through their accomplishments, each student’s contribution more than stands on its own.”