At any moment in the Owen Arts Center, piano tunes waft from classrooms, budding actors practice their faux swordfights and ballerinas pirouette in the hallways. Advertising Professor Patricia Alvey finds the creative environment “thrilling and stimulating.”
Patricia Alvey, Temerlin Advertising Institute
SMU’s Temerlin Advertising Institute for Education and Research in Meadows School of the Arts shares space with art, music, theatre and other fine arts students and faculty. “I love the energy. It’s delightful that I ended up back in an art school,” says Alvey, Distinguished Chair and Director of the Institute. Before receiving a Ph.D. in advertising from the University of Texas at Austin, Alvey earned a B.F.A. in drawing and painting from Murray State University.
With a painter’s eye and a pragmatist’s work ethic, she “fell into advertising,” making a happy landing in a field where her passions for art, academics and altruism intersect. Early on she appreciated the blend of personal and professional satisfaction that came from working with nonprofit groups. She designed everything from brochures to brand-identity programs for the Texas Capital Preservation Campaign, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and other organizations. Her work on behalf of the March of Dimes won national Summit International Design awards, which recognize outstanding efforts by small- to mid-sized creative companies.
Alvey also made a name for herself in academia. She headed the creative advertising program at the University of Texas at Austin before being named executive director of the Virginia Commonwealth University Adcenter, an elite two-year advertising graduate program.
When Alvey arrived at the Temerlin Advertising Institute (TAI) in fall 2002, it was “brand-new and had the blush of fresh success. Although the strategic business portion of the program was strong, there was no creative program to speak of,” she recalls.
Working with TAI faculty, she implemented new admission criteria and a redefined curriculum with “toughened courses.” She recruited and hired new creative faculty, and to supplement classroom lessons, Alvey and her faculty called upon their industry colleagues for lectures and critiques.
Students have responded to the higher expectations by becoming nationally competitive and collecting a trove of trophies. In addition to a cluster of Dallas Ad League ADDY awards, students earned awards from the Houston Art Directors Club and the Dallas Society for Visual Communication. Their work has been published in CMYK Magazine, which is a national showcase for student creative work in advertising, design, illustration and photography. Last year two students made it to the finals of the international One Club Client Pitch, where only seven schools qualified to compete. In 2006, a 30-second TV spot created by an eight-student team won a contest sponsored by national restaurant chain Chipotle.
“These are not lightweight competitions,” says Mike Sullivan, president of The Loomis Agency in Dallas, who has been a guest speaker at the Institute. “Patty and her team didn’t take it up just one notch; they took it up five or six.”
“An overarching goal of the Institute is to help students understand that the creativity and skills used to drive business also can be used for public service.”
– Patricia Alvey
In preparing for the high-caliber contests, students experience the creative process – from concepting to storyboarding to post-production work – as if they were producing a national advertising campaign at a top agency. Senior advertising major Allie Edwards is part of a team of advertising and cinema-television students developing a TV spot for the One Show national student competition. She appreciates Alvey’s critiques. “She looks at our work from the standpoint of a creative director who would be hiring us, so her feedback is important and helpful,” Edwards says.
Good advertising is “different, engaging, provocative and surprising,” Alvey says. “Much of what I truly love isn’t seen that much by the public in the U.S.” She likes the steamy spots by Bartle Bogle Hegarty for Axe men’s body products and Levi’s; the visually complex, whimsical work of Wieden & Kennedy for British Honda; and “a great deal of the work coming out of Amsterdam, São Paulo and Singapore.”
Alvey also prizes advertising that serves the greater good. “An overarching goal of the Institute is to help students understand that the creativity and skills used to drive business also can be used for public service,” she says.
A few months after she arrived, Alvey accepted a challenge from SMU’s Center for Drug and Alcohol Abuse Prevention for TAI to develop an alcohol awareness campaign targeted at students. Advertising students teamed up with faculty to produce a series of bold posters, visible across campus over the next four years, to send the message that irresponsible drinking was the exception, not the social norm. Most recently she led focus group research as a member of SMU’s Task Force on Substance Abuse Prevention.
Another significant project, the World Citizens Guide, reached more than 800 campuses across the country. Published in 2004, the passport-sized book serves a weighty purpose: to sensitize students to cultural differences, making them “worldly” travelers and effective ambassadors. To date, more than 120,000 copies have been distributed. A sister publication, tailored to business travelers, has been distributed to more than 40,000 individuals and businesses.
Alvey ticks off some of the Institute’s current projects: “Right now, we’re teaming up with the Division of Cinema-Television to produce spots for Doritos for The One Show National Student Competition. The TAI Ad Team is working on an AOL project for the American Advertising Federation’s National Student Advertising Competition. Our research and campaigns classes are working with IDEARC, a recent spin-off of Verizon, as a corporate client. And the list is just for this semester.”
– Patricia Ward