UBC’s Newest Don Drapers

Canada’s Next Top Ad Exec | BCBusiness
Students from UBC’s Sauder School of Business placed third in Canada’s Next Top Ad Exec competition with their marketing campaign for the Chevy Spark.

An advertising competition puts the spotlight on an industry basking in the limelight.

Have you heard of the Chevy Spark? If you haven’t, you will, thanks to some of the youngest marketing minds in the industry.

The “Next Top” bandwagon, which encompasses everything from modelling and fashion design to cooking, now includes advertising. Canada’s Next Top Ad Exec might be best described as Iron Chef meets Mad Men, but without the television cameras. The competition, which is based out of McMaster University’s DeGroote School of Business, this year partnered with sponsor General Motors Co., to invite business students from across the country to produce a winning campaign for Chevrolet’s newest introduction.

In 2012, Canada’s Next Top Ad Exec received 191 first-round submissions from 32 business schools – more than four times as many as its first year – making it easily the largest business competition in Canada, says Mandeep Malik, assistant professor of marketing at McMaster University.

The competition took place in three rounds, beginning with an elevator pitch and then a detailed strategy document. Finally, the top 10 teams battled for scholarships, internships and new cars as they faced off in front of a panel of 21 judges representing industry and academia. This year, students from McMaster and Queens universities took first- and second-place honours, respectively, while Veronica Yeung and Christopher Larryant, from UBC’s Sauder School of Business, became B.C.’s first team in the competition’s history to make the final three.

Like any Top Model or Idol competition, it’s hard to say whether the best-marketed product is the Spark or the students themselves. Yeung landed a summer internship with PepsiCo Canada, and Larryant will be spending his summer working for Chevrolet Canada.

McMaster’s Malik says the idea is to bridge the gap between Canadian business schools and the marketing and advertising industries, highlighting one as a go-to source for talent and the other as a viable career market.

Like Mad Men, Next Top Ad Exec began in 2007. Is it just a coincidence, or is advertising sexy again? “As people become more participative in the advertising process – as consumers become creators of advertising – they start consuming it very differently,” says Malik. “Whether they see it or not, they are taking part in creating advertising. As soon as people press ‘like’ and become the 25th-million person on Facebook who likes Starbucks, they become a proponent of the brand.”

So, has the industry turned its focus inward? Ad Week, launched by the Institute of Communication Agencies in 2009, has become an annual industry celebration each January. In 2011, veteran Canadian ad man and broadcaster Terry O’Reilly donated a 50,000-piece catalogue of advertising material to McMaster, helping to establish the largest industry archive in Canada.

And the industry’s latest endeavour is the Canadian Advertising Museum, an online project.

“Maybe it’s just a coincidence that everything started happening at the same time, and we got lucky with that,” says Malik of the perfect storm of pop-culture attention, industry initiative and participative social media. “Maybe it was great minds thinking alike. But we’re all helping each other as a result.”