Royal Oak Advertising Interns Develop Campaign for Non-Profit

Four Royal Oak interns spent the day Monday developing a comprehensive campaign for a Detroit-based non-profit.

Julie Bushart, Kevin Long, Scot Clemens and Kelsey Campbell are all interns at Know Advertising in Royal Oak. Working with interns from Detroit Venture Partners, they teamed up for a one-day intern competition called Idea Generation: The Non-Profit Project.

Breaking into four teams, the interns spent the day in downtown Detroit developing creative concepts for The Empowerment Plan, a non-profit that employs homeless women to make  jackets, which double as sleeping bags, for the homeless 

"We don't have a marketing budget or advertising budget," said Megan Stjcevski, development director for the The Empowerment Plan.  "We saw a lot of things that are doable right now without a massive budget." 

One of the concepts the interns explored was targeting the outdoor apparel market with a buy a coat, give a coat to a person in need promotion.

"The presentations were really inspiring," said Stjcevski. "Some of the ideas never occurred to us, I can tell you, because we've brainstormed over these types of things. We'll definitely be implementing a lot of what they came up with."

The event was a great opportunity for the interns, too. 

"It's really great to put together a whole campaign in one day," said Bushart, whose team come up with the winning tagline: Wear One, Share One. "It's really cool to get to work with other interns and see all the ideas come together and to present them to judges. It's the kind of real world experience we need before we graduate."

Rick Van House, president of Know Advertising, was pleased with the maiden voyage of Idea Generation: The Non-Profit Project.

"Every single team had a idea that could work  and could be implemented tomorrow," said Van House.