Starbucks Engages the Miami Ad School Innovation Lab

Since the first of Miami Ad School's Boot Camps for Account Planners was held in 1998, the climax of the Boot Camp has been the presentation of strategies and creative work to a live client. From the very beginning, these presentations--the culmination of 10 weeks of concerted effort by up to 10 teams of students--featured eye-opening, unconventional thinking that challenged the status-quo.

Over the years, word has spread, and so has demand. This led to the development of the Innovation Lab. The Lab allows clients to access the bleeding-edge creativity of our students, the Pop Culture Engineers. The students, in turn, gain invaluable, rubber-meets-the-road experience in dealing and addressing real-world communications issues and their attendant complexities. Innovation Lab clients have included: American Express, Apple, Dairy Queen, Dunkin’ Donuts, FedEx, Ford, Go Daddy, Hormel, Mini, The New York Times, Nike, Office Max, Saturn, Wendy’s, and Yahoo!

The latest addition to this roster of heavyweight Innovation Lab clients is Starbucks. Back in January, marketing staff from Starbucks, PepsiCo and their joint venture, the North American Coffee Partnership--along with their lifestyle-marketing agency, Freedom Zone--came to Miami to brief an assembled gaggle of 40 Pop Culture Engineers--art directors, copywriters and account planners--divided into 10 mini-agencies. The mission: create a campaign promoting the DoubleShot Espresso energy drink that would extend a project Starbucks had participated in with HBO Films. “We knew we had [in the HBO Films project] the nugget of an idea,” Richard Burjaw, General Manager of the North American Coffee Partnership recalled, “but we needed more creativity, and we needed it from our target which is people in their late teens and early 20s. This opportunity was a neat way for us to get some different thinking and engage our target market.”

In early March, the client returned to Miami Ad School for the team presentations, and they were not disappointed. “Today was amazing,” enthused Jim Milligan, President of Freedom Zone. “We got to sit down and go through the work of 10 different groups, and there is no better way to figure out what a peer group wants than to get input from their peers.” He continued, “It’s for the Millennials, by the Millennials. It’s pure thinking; that’s the stuff we were hoping for and that’s what we got.”

“I would encourage any client who’s interested in getting a different point of view from a different audience to come down to Miami Ad School,” Burjaw added. “I would strongly recommend it.”

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