Get in the AIM Game!

I recently returned from the Southern California regionals of the National Student Advertising Competition (NSAC). My fellow classmates and I represented UNLV for the first time at this level and spent months working with AIM and AIM Social Media products. The assignment was to create a full campaign to promote AIM, increase AIM brand awareness, grow trial and usage, and bridge the gap between AIM and AIM Social Media products. The campaign included advertising, promotions, public relations, marketing and product development. In short, A LOT of work.

Our campaign was “Get in the AIM Game,” a fun and young approach feeding off the already established appeal of AIM. We heavily focused on the mobile capabilities of AIM and the target market (18-24 year olds) obsession with mobile devices. I am unbelievably proud of the product we created and believe it would have been the perfect campaign to bridge the gap of AIM users to AIM Social Media (AIM’s version of MySpace).

The competition put us up against many well known Southern California universities. We were suppose to be judged by the client (AOL) and industry professionals. Unfortunately the AOL judge wasn’t present and were judged by agency people, who, in our opinion, were not aware of the full scope of AIM and its users. I don’t feel that this made for a fair competition. Retrospectively, it was still an amazing experience. Social networking is such an incredible phenomenon that AIM is trying to once again get back in the game (see the reference here!).

It was an incredible experience to see how social networking is evolving and how many different ways it can be interpreted. I only hope that one day AOL will give us (and the other 8 teams) our 20 minutes, maybe then AIM can get back in the game!