AOF Students One Step Closer to Final Ad Designs

Two classes of 9th and 10th grade students in Fort Lee High School’s Academy of Finance (AOF) met with their “clients”—local businesses participating in the “Design an Ad Program”—last Friday for a second time. And if the results of those meetings are any indication, the seven participating businesses face a difficult decision this week.

Last Friday’s meetings represented the second step in a program, previously reported by Patch, aimed at giving students real-life, hands-on experience in media and marketing by teaming up with local businesses to see an advertising project through from concept to completion—the day when the businesses, known in the program as clients, were supposed to return to the high school classroom after having met their assigned student ad teams the previous week, provide feedback on what the four-to five-member teams had come up with and narrow down their decision from five potential ads to three.

But that turned out to be a more difficult task than organizers of the program had anticipated.

The quality of the work the ad teams produced in just a week was just that good.

“[The businesses] were blown away by how good the ads were,” said AOF board member and professional business coach Margaret Maclay, who organizes and helped found the program two years ago. “What we were supposed to do was narrow down from five to three ads. Each kid on the team was supposed to bring a design concept to the table, and then the business owner was supposed to say, ‘These are the three I like the most, so you guys continue working on those.’ But the reality was they were all good.”

That means that this Friday, when the clients return to Fort Lee High School for a third and final time, they are going to have to choose one out of five instead of one out of three ads.

Participation in the program—now in its third year—doesn’t guarantee that the ads will be used. There are no promises of that. But this year, it’s likely they will be, at least in Maclay’s estimation.

“The quality is really good; the kids are excited,” she said. “Everybody was saying that they were definitely going to be using these ads for more than just the purposes of this program. The general feedback was that they would be using them moving forward, which I think is great, because that doesn’t always happen.”

In previous years, students in the program designed newspaper print ads. This year they’re designing online banner ads.

Maclay told Patch previously that a total of eight banner ads are being produced this year by two classes—one group of 9th graders and one group of 10th graders in the AOF program—for the following local businesses (with representatives of those businesses in parentheses):

• Chloe’s Gift Pet Photography (Wendy DuBoff)
• Yippee Printing & Marketing (Marian Gordon)
• Mybergen.com (Ed Burns)
• Allied Financial (Anna Lazar)
• FocalPoint Coaching (Margret Maclay)
• Matisse Chocolatier (Lucille Skroce)
• Fort Lee Chamber (Mirela Tarabakija)

On Friday those businesses will select which of the ads they’re going with, after which the student ad teams have a few days to make any corrections or do any additional tweaking before delivering them to Mybergen.com to post by May 18.

Patch will have the final results of the “Design an Ad Program” after Friday’s decision day.