UH advertising students dominated the 2010 Houston Addy Awards, winning a grand total of nine awards, including four gold, two silver and three Citations of Excellence.
Seven UH students won the awards — Heather Diaz, Dwayne O’Brien, Karen Lopez, Rachel Williamson, Laura Martinez, Miriam Guessous and Owen J. Woghiren.
The Addys are sponsored by the Houston chapter of the American Advertising Federation, which is an association of advertising professionals encompassing all sectors in the advertising, marketing and communication industries.
“In the past, our school only won one or two awards, but this year we won nine, which is a really big deal for me and our university,” said Guessous, president of AAF-UH. “We won more awards than any other college that attended.”
Other colleges include Sam Houston State, St. Thomas University, Texas Southern University and Texas A&M.
To win an Addy, participants must submit an advertisement from a chosen category, which include print, outdoor (billboards), television, interactive, poster and campaign.
The ads are then submitted to the AAF-Houston in the fall, and the winners are announced later in the year. Although the winners are told they have won, they are not told where they placed until the gala in February.
This year it was held at the Hyatt Regency in downtown.
“The gala was very fancy; they served us dinner, announced all the winners and took our picture,” Guessous said. “They also had a gallery that had all the winning ads on display.”
Guessous won two certificates of excellence. One was for an ad featuring Patron Tequila, and the other was for a billboard and magazine ad for the Mercedes SLK 350.
“For the Patron ad, I had a partner, Caroline Barerra. She was the copy writer, and I was the art director,” Guessous said. “The art director does the layout, and the copy writer writes any text that is going to be in the ad. We took the actual Patron billboards you see around Houston and added our own little twist.”
Guessous said the Patron ad took about two days to complete, but the Mercedes campaign took longer.
“We knew how the creative process worked so it took about three weeks to make the ad happen,” she said. “We went through a lot of sketches to narrow it down.”
Guessous said having so many UH students win the award promotes the University and the work students do here.
“The biggest advantage of winning nine awards is that all the Houston professionals who attended the awards ceremony saw how UH students dominated all the different categories,” Guessous said. “Maybe in the future, they will hire more students from our school because they saw that we have a lot of creative people here. We were really trying to change the way people think about our school by doing the best job we could have done, and I think we did.”
