Media Planning in the Foreground: Comparing the Washington Media Scholars Case Competition and the NSAC

Abstract

Each semester, I share with my media planning students the wise words of Bill Bernbach: “If your message goes unnoticed, everything else is academic.” Despite the truth behind this sentiment, media planners rarely get the glory in the ad industry. Media planners, like media planning professors, are used to working behind the scenes. Big-name competitions (for students as for professionals) often focus more on the creative execution than how that message is delivered to a target audience, and what media professors spend a semester teaching often gets reduced to one flowchart in a plansbook. That is what makes the Washington Media Scholars Foundation’s Media Plan Case Competition so unique. It’s a prestigious, rigorous, national student competition—and its sole focus is the creation of a strategic media plan. According to its website, the Washington Media Scholars Foundation is a nonprofit organization that “. . . engages with undergraduate students, connecting deserving young people with senior-level executives from major media companies and providing academic scholarships to students pursuing degrees in a variety of disciplines” (Washington Media Scholars Foundation, n.d.). The Foundation coordinates a separate need-based scholarship program twice a