Photo by: Nick Conley
Oklahoma Christian University’s Marketing and Communications Department recently took home three trophies from the 47th-annual Oklahoma City ADDY Awards.
The local tier of the advertising industry’s largest competition honored the Oklahoma Christian department with gold, silver and bronze ADDYs for three Oklahoma Christian websites.
“This is kind of a validation that the work we’re doing is as good as the work that other people in the city are doing,” Stephen Bell, the Oklahoma Christian director of web services, said of winning the awards.
Bell, along with the web marketing team of Nick Sayre and Micah Domina, received the silver ADDY for Oklahoma Christian’s main public website, www.oc.edu, and the bronze for www.oceagles.com, Oklahoma Christian’s athletics website.
Nick Sayre, Jonathan Curtis and Will Blanchard received the gold ADDY for www.oc.edu/homeward, an Oklahoma Christian microsite that promotes alumni contributions.
Sayre, a web developer and designer for the department, headed the gold-winning Homeward website project.
“This is my first time to enter, so I’m really honored to have won anything at all, much less win for all three of the things we have entered,” Sayre said. “It’s not just something we personally feel good about; we think it reflects really well on Oklahoma Christian as well.”
Bell said the awards also shine on their own education through Oklahoma Christian.
“One thing that’s unique about this office is that most of us are alumni of the university, so it also reflects well on the Art and Design Department and on the Communications Department,” Bell said.
According to the ADDY’s website, the ADDY Awards, “is the advertising industry’s largest and most representative competition, attracting over 50,000 entries every year in local ADDY competitions.”
The ADDY competition’s goal is to “recognize and reward creative excellence in the art of advertising.” The competition has three levels: local, district-wide and national. A panel of judges evaluates the creative dimensions of entries in categories ranging from book design to video ads.
A gold ADDY award “is recognition of the highest level of creative excellence and is judged to be superior to all other entries in the competition” and will move on to compete against other winners in one of 14 districts across the country.
Winners advance from there to a final, national competition. The Oklahoma City Ad Club hosts the local level.
This is the fourth year Oklahoma Christian has entered the contest. The university has won awards in the past for various print marketing materials, Bell said.
“It’s been a few years since the last time we entered,” Bell said. “This year we only entered web projects.”
Sayre said the awards are good, but their ultimate goal is for something different.
“It’s nice to be recognized, but there’s obviously other things that are important to us besides the recognition,” Sayre said. “A lot of the reward for what we do is that more students come to school here or for more people to donate, in the case of the Homeward site.”
A goal of the university’s marketing department is to attract positive attention to the school.
“A lot of our projects, the point of them is for outward marketing,” Sayre said. “We’re reaching out in a lot of cases, trying to attract students and represent Oklahoma Christian really well.”
Bell said they plan on entering the contest again next year, but what they will enter remains a mystery.
“We don’t know what we’re going to enter until it actually rolls around and we see what we have finished,” Bell said.
VI Marketing and Branding, a company that works with Oklahoma Christian, also won three bronze awards for advertisements promoting the school’s MBA program.
Several Oklahoma Christian alumni were also honored with ADDY awards, including: Taylor Goad for Funnel Design Group; Jonathan Hord for Insight Creative Group; Steve Jones for Digital DK, Robot House Creative and Third Degree Advertising; Jonathan Lindsey for S Design; Amy Nickerson for Insight Creative Group and Christy Watson for The Foundation for Oklahoma City Public Schools.
Sayre said he appreciates the awards.
“I would just say that we are grateful and humbled to be honored by our peers in the OKC Ad Club,” Sayre said.
0
0
Be First to Comment