Marketing and Mentoring

Two years ago, as Anand Chopra-McGowan was walking through Kenmore Square, he looked up and saw his future.

“It was my sophomore year,” he says. “I saw this big, huge billboard on top of Bertucci’s.” The sign, decorated with a baseball, read, “Now Taking Reservations for October.” It was one of the most talked-about ads ever created by AdLab, BU’s student-run advertising agency.

This semester, Chopra-McGowan (COM’07) is president of AdLab, a two-credit class at the College of Communication. He oversees the scores of ads the agency designs for clients around Boston and beyond.

“We operate exactly as an ad agency would,” says Tobe Berkovitz, COM dean ad interim. “We have a similar management structure, similar operating procedures, and a similar mission to professional agencies.”

The students in the course manage 30 to 40 clients each semester. “That’s a huge agency roster,” Berkovitz says. “If you’re an ad agency and you have 40 clients, you’re at the top of the world.”

Companies, shops, and private individuals pay AdLab $100 a semester to design advertisements for them. For the same treatment in the real world, “some of these clients are paying their agencies as much as $16,000 to $17,000 a month,” says John Verret, a COM associate professor and one of AdLab’s faculty advisors.

In fact, the bargain is a two-way street: companies such as Fidelity Investments, the Boston Globe, and the Boston Celtics get steeply discounted rates on their ads, and BU students get invaluable hands-on experience. Working two hours each week (and often many more), AdLab students create concepts that will represent their clients in print, on air, and on the Web. “What we have to do is make sure that we have full, final ad campaigns for 28 clients finished and ready at the end of 14 weeks,” says Chopra-McGowan. “It gives us this opportunity to do a huge variety of work, from slick marketing campaigns to heartwarming brochures.”

AdLab students design logos,
like this one for Philadelphia-
based Mariner Insurance.
Photo courtesy of Anand
Chopra-McGowan

During her first year at AdLab, Margarita Epshteyn (COM’07) created a puzzle made of Post-It notes and a MySpace.com page for BarFrog, a Boston-based nightlife Web site. “We developed some not-very-conventional advertising,” she says.

The Boston Underground Film Festival has been an AdLab client since 2005. Festival director Anna Feder describes the student-run agency as professional and well run. “Last spring, when they were creating print ads for us, they came up with something interesting,” she says. “The bunny is the mascot of the festival, and they ended up putting these sultry ladies with bunny heads in different environments, like a film strip in which the lady is removing her bunny head. It’s strange, it’s dark, it’s dramatic — it was really good.”

George Spowart, senior vice president at Allen & Gerritsen, a Watertown-based advertising agency, says AdLab’s idea for a campaign for a ski resort — hiring someone to walk around Boston dressed in a snowman costume — was different from anything his firm would have come up with.

Toyota hired AdLab to develop innovative ways to reach prospective customers of its Scion — teens and 20-somethings. “The biggest project was with Facebook,” Verret says. “They were asking, ‘How can we advertise on Facebook and talk to kids in a language they should understand?’”

AdLab is the kind of place you can make mistakes without fearing for your job, according to Epshteyn. “Some of the mistakes you make, you really take notice of them,” she says. “You say, ‘Oh, my God — could I be fired for that in the real world!’”

Students also deal with the real-world challenge of managing clients. While designing in-house signage for the Boston Globe, AdLab students learned how to assert themselves to harried managers. “The Boston Globe was a very tough client,” Verret says. “The kids battled back and forth with these guys, because it was a low priority for the folks at the Globe.”

Started in 1974 by Walter Lubars and Bob Montgomery, COM professors emeriti, AdLab has grown into the nation’s largest student-run ad agency. Students find that AdLab’s reputation is an asset when it comes time to look for a job.  

“When you mention AdLab in a lot of places around the country, lots of ears perk up,” says Chopra-McGowan, who is currently job-hunting. “I know that there are some people I’ve spoken to who recognize that.”

Berkovitz agrees: “AdLab is like the gold standard of experience for students looking for jobs in advertising. It gives them a huge head start.”