By Lauren Lyngstad
This semester, I have had the opportunity to be a student in the Cox School of Business Honors Marketing Practicum. This course takes place every fall for a select group of graduating Marketing majors, and it has easily been one of my favorite courses that I have taken during my time at SMU. Essentially, at the beginning of the year we start off with 25 students in the class. From there, we divide into five teams consisting of five students. The teams are chosen draft-style–the class designates five leaders and each leader chooses their team members with a goal of creating the best, most well-rounded team. After that, the fun begins!
For the past four years, this course, and SMU, has partnered with FOX. Every year, FOX Sports kicks off the course by visiting the classroom and proposing a semester-long project to the class. From there, the five teams of student compete to develop the best solution to the project that FOX has presented. This year, we have been tasked with developing a national campaign for FOX Sports 1 soccer programming. At first, I must admit that I was a little bit intimidated by the gravity of the project. After all, this was a NATIONAL campaign! After the intimidation period passed, our group got down to business. We started off the semester by conducting extensive secondary and primary research. From there, we began to develop ad campaign ideas to present to FOX.
Earlier in March, executives and employees from FS1 flew out from Los Angeles and also joined us via Skype. Our group was given a 30-minute meeting to present our research, campaign ideas and receive employee feedback. It was such a phenomenal opportunity to be sitting in a conference with some of FS1’s most influential employees. We walked away from the meeting with praise, criticism and a renewed passion for the rest of the semester. Currently, we are working on finalizing our final campaign that will be presented to FOX Sports later this month. It has been an absolutely crazy ride, but we have had so much fun dreaming up advertising ideas for social media campaigns, print ads, commercials and more. I cannot wait to see our final product, and I am crossing my fingers that FS1 chooses our project!