Mohawk College students win 6th gold in national marketing competition

A team of Mohawk College advertising students has won gold at the Canadian Marketing Association awards for the sixth year in a row.

"We were really pressured," laughed student Sarah Quinto, who was part of the winning team.

"We didn’t want to be the one year that broke the streak."

'Of all the awards shows, this one is the most comprehensive. There are pages and pages of requirements that you can’t forget or you get disqualified.' —Jef Petrossi, Mohawk College instructor

The group of third-year students didn’t disappoint, scooping up the top prize in both the creative and marketing categories.

The competition requires students to tackle case studies created by the CMA, coming up with a creative campaign and marketing Jef Petrossi strategy for the respective categories. This year’s case studies askedstudents to market Webstream, a fictional movie streaming service similar to Netflix, and come up with a strategic directive for SickKids hospital.

"It takes three weeks, three hard weeks," instructor Jef Petrossi explained.

"Of all the awards shows, this one is the most comprehensive. There are pages and pages of requirements that you can’t forget or you get disqualified."

The winning entry for the creative category was an intricate mail-out that hooked potential Webstream customers with humour and played off the fictional service’s abundance of movies.

Mohawk Advertising students have won a total of 28 CMA Awards and last year swept the student awards, winning gold, silver and bronze in both the Creative and Marketing categories.

They’ve had success in other competitions as well, winning silver for this year’s Advertising & Design Club of Canada student awards and five winning entries in the Applied Arts student awards.

Petrossi said advertising is an awards-focused industry, so the Mohawk program takes these competitions very seriously.

"We put a huge emphasis on it because we believe it is the best way to market the program not just to students, but to the industry."