News 2005-2006
School of Mass Communications student wins new car from ad agency and local car dealer
A talented University of South Florida mass communications student from a class of 14 studying cutting edge marketing received the keys to a brand new 2006 Hyundai April 28 in the Communication and Information Sciences building on the Tampa campus.
The car was presented by the advertising agency Zimmerman Partners and Hyundai of New Port Richey to senior Katlyn Sheddy of Ft. Lauderdale in recognition of superior performance this past semester in an advertising class dubbed “Car Wars: lessons from the biggest marketing battlefield in the world.”
The competition pitted students in the Zimmerman Advertising Program (ZAP) against one another to be judged best student in the vertical marketing communications class, one of four advertising electives offered by the USF School of Mass Communications.
Jordan Zimmerman, who attended the award ceremony, is a USF graduate and founder and/chairman of the largest advertising agency in the southeastern United States, Zimmerman Advertising, an Omnicom Group Company, based in Fort Lauderdale. Some of Zimmerman’s clients include Nissan, Papa John’s Pizza, Music Land Group and Office Depot. He created ZAP with a $200,000 gift in 2005 to help develop a leading edge model for advertising education at one of the nation’s top communications schools.
This semester’s class featured presentations from Cliff Courtney, Zimmerman’s chief strategic officer and members of the staff. The course centered on the car industry covering every aspect of the process from category history, consumer research, original equipment manufacture, branding, local store marketing and the sales process through customer loyalty.
Students were put through a series of demanding exercises. “We gave them tough assignments with real world crisis solving and grueling deadlines,” said Courtney. “We chose the car industry because it is the largest consumer industry in the world, one that affects the global economy and involves thinking about the entire process from drawing board to factory to driveway. The car itself is a product that people have strong emotions and tremendous passion about. Everyone could get excited about this.”
“Zimmerman handles Nissan and the Autoway franchises,” noted Coby O’Brien, ZAP coordinator. “The people there are in a unique position to teach our students valuable lessons they would not usually learn until four or five years into the business. Our students are being exposed to privileged insights from the experts.”
The top student was evaluated through class performance, homework and a final examination. Courtney also said he was looking for the “X” factor described in the syllabus as “enigmatic, seemingly hard-to-measure sparks of energy, imagination, presentation or even simply cut-through-the-noise common sense.”
Scott Fink, of New Port Richey Hyundai, was a guest speaker in one of the classes. “When I heard they wanted to give the top student a used car, I suggested a new car,” Fink said. “Because of my long-standing relationship with Jordan and the agency, which handles our advertising, we decided to make it a brand new Hyundai Accent.”
Zimmerman is paying all taxes, title and handling costs for the car. “We want there to be zero out-of-pocket costs for the winning student,” Zimmerman said.
The ZAP class follows Brandtailing™, a corporate philosophy at Zimmerman. “Overall, students are learning how to build a brand for tomorrow that will produce sales today,” said Courtney. “That theme is woven through all the courses we are offering and informs all the skills we impart.”
Last semester, Papa John’s Pizza provided the real-life advertising case study for the course. The top team members were flown to Ft. Lauderdale to spend several days at Zimmerman Advertising and two students from that class have since been hired by the agency.
“USF advertising students are getting access to the real world of top-tier advertising through the new elective courses made possible by the Zimmerman team and the USF mass communications faculty,” said Edward Jay Friedlander, director of the School of Mass Communications. “There’s no question these courses are preparing students for key positions in the advertising profession.”
As part of the program, Zimmerman and members of his executive team from Zimmerman Advertising fly in from Ft. Lauderdale every Friday to teach students and share their real-life experiences in the world of advertising.
Zimmerman currently ranks as the 17th largest advertising agency in the United States, with just under $2 billion in billings, more than 860 full-time associates and 22 offices throughout the country.
School of Mass Communications names Pulitzer Prize-winner as Clendinen professor
The University of South Florida's School of Mass Communications has named Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Aregood, former editorial page editor for the Star Ledger in Newark, New Jersey, as the seventh James A. Clendinen Professor in Editorial and Critical Writing.
The Clendinen Professor teaches a mass communications class in editorial and commentary writing and lectures at USF on a topic related to editorials and commentaries, according to Edward Jay Friedlander, director of the School of Mass Communications. Aregood's course will be offered during the spring term of 2006.
Aregood won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. He is also the three-time winner of the distinguished writing award of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the 1994 recipient of the Scripps-Howard Foundation’s Walker Stone Award for Editorial Writing.
The Clendinen Professor is chosen each year by the School of Mass Communications and the Tampa Tribune. The guest faculty position honors James Clendinen, who served for half a century as a Tribune editor and chairman of the editorial board. After he died in 1991, Clendinen's friends, family and employer endowed a professorship in his name at USF.
Aregood’s career began with the Dix-McGuire Mirror, a now-defunct weekly that served military bases in southern New Jersey, where he worked as editor, reporter and photographer. He went on to become a reporter and night city editor at the Burlington County Times and a stringer for United Press International, the New York World-Telegram, as well as others. He was also a police reporter at the Philadelphia Daily News during Mayor Frank Rizzo’s term in office. In 1975, Aregood became chief editorial writer of Philadelphia’s Daily News and moved up to editorial page editor in 1978. He left Philadelphia in 1995 to take on the job of editorial page editor of the Star Ledger until his retirement.
The Rutgers University Hall of Distinguished Alumni inducted Aregood in 1993. He also serves as a member of the Dean’s Council for the Rutgers-Camden College of Arts and Sciences.