Decision Day: Local Businesses Choose Ads Designed by AOF Students

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”—for the final time Friday, when representatives of those businesses made their final decision on which student-designed ads they plan to use.

It was the last step in a program, previously reported by Patch here and here, 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.

AOF board member and professional business coach Margaret Maclay, who started the ad design program two years ago—it’s now in it’s third year—told students in Fort Lee High School Teacher Nadege Stretz’s second “Intro to Business” class of the day, “this is the big day.”

“In real life when you actually work on a project like this and there are multiple submits of either a proposal or photographs or advertisements, etc., everybody contributes and puts a lot of work into it,” Maclay said to the AOF students Friday. “And whichever one is selected is the one the client really feels is the most effective, the most useful, the most representative of them.”

The two classes of 9th and 10th graders in the AOF program—a total of about 35 students, Stretz said—produced eight ads this year selected by the following seven local participating businesses and their representatives:

• 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)

Maclay offered encouragement to those whose designs were not chosen Friday.

“All your ads were fantastic, and I’ll tell you, this morning, the clients had a very, very difficult time deciding which ones they wanted to use,” she said, referring to the earlier class. “We’re probably all going to be using all of them, so the one that’s going to be selected today, is going to be the one that is most representative of what the business owner was looking for.”

The student ad teams now have a few days to make any corrections or do any final tweaking before delivering their online banner ads to Mybergen.com for posting by May 18.