Texas Creative Students Take Home Best of Show at Austin’s 2022 American Advertising Awards
On Thursday, February 17th, the advertising community gathered to Celebrate Icons, at Austin’s 2022 American Advertising Awards. It was quite a night for UT Austin’s advertising program with students and professors alike taking home awards for their creative work. Of the many prestigious awards given that evening, second-year graduate student Abby Adams and senior Helen Hulsey took home Best of Show in the student category for two murals that were part of their “Between Homes” campaign for U-Haul. Abby and Helen worked as a copywriter and art director team to put together this award-winning campaign.
“It was definitely unexpected!” Helen said. “Abby and I spent many hours concepting, tweaking, and perfecting every part of this campaign, so it felt very rewarding to see it pay off.”
Abby and Helen are both students in the Texas Creative sequence enrolled in the Portfolio 4 class. Students in the program spend each semester crafting campaigns to add to their portfolios. Abby and Helen decided to pursue a campaign with U-Haul because it’s a well-known brand that allowed for a lot of creative freedom. “There's definitely an art to picking brands, and I think Helen and I were looking for something that people instantly understood, but also had a lot of room for growth. U-Haul was a great fit for that,” Abby said. “For our Between Homes Campaign, we wanted to see if we could solve a real problem with the resources available to U-Haul. Actually doing something with what you have is the best way to communicate what you care about and we wanted to apply that same principle to U-Haul. Turning unused trucks into living space for the homeless felt like a simple and authentic answer to that,” Helen said.
What’s next for these star creatives? Abby states, “for U-Haul- we're going to District along with a few of our classmates. For our dynamic duo- we've just started on another campaign for Venmo. For me personally- I'm not sure what's next, but I'm looking forward to finishing out my book this semester and graduating in May.” Helen also plans to graduate this spring with an exciting internship lined up for the summer. “This summer I'll be working at R/GA New York as a Design Intern. It'll be remote for the summer but I plan to move out to NYC in the fall.”
All gold medal winners from the evening will automatically move forward and have their work judged in the District competition which takes place in Houston in April. To see Abby and Helen’s work and all of the incredible, award-winning work from UT Austin students and faculty visit: https://www.austinadfed.com/addys-2022/.
