Student-run marketing creative offers companies an inside perspective for the college demographic from the minds of Belmont’s talented students
There’s a new marketing agency in Music City. Part of a collaboration between the Watkins College of Art and the Cone Center for Entrepreneurship, Reevo Creative offers innovative marketing solutions curated by a team of talented students enrolled in a new upper elective course at Belmont: ART 3895 Special Topics.
To end its first semester, the class celebrated a brand unveiling after launching a marketing startup and consulting with Harvest Hands, a South Nashville-based community development center, to promote the Good Coffee Fest in October.
“Helping with the Good Coffee Fest included coming up with marketing strategies and creating designs for posters and merchandise, among other things,” said design communications senior Celine Sanderson. “Working with real clients is different from projects for class, and there are a lot more variables that you have to consider. It’s made me feel more prepared to take on life after I graduate.”
Reflecting the workforce experience rather than that of the traditional classroom, students from different majors are enrolled in the class. This interdisciplinary endeavor brought business, entrepreneurship, media production, journalism, design communications, experiential design and illustration students together to form Reevo Creative.
“I’ve spent my entire career working at ad agencies,” said Vice President of Prisma Nashville, LLC Craig Daws. “I don’t know why but I was surprised that you're not all design students. I shouldn’t have been. I’ve worked with ad agencies that had everything from sales to accounting to copywriting. This is really impressive.”
Reevo’s mission is to function as an agency that creates unique opportunities for students to hone their creative skills while engaging with clients to provide innovative marketing solutions. The class created an agency brand book that will serve as a foundation for future cohorts to build from and incorporate their own ideas.
“We wanted to emphasize providing value not only to the clients we serve by making the companies better and reaching the target market but also providing value to the students that work with us,” general business senior Colson Kelly said.
As companies strive to reach younger generations in college, Reevo Creative leverages the competitive advantage of being a student-run agency that can produce innovative and relevant material that connects with this key demographic.
Professionals came from agencies in Nashville to visit the class and share their industry insights. The class also visited the marketing agency Snapshot Interactive to see firsthand what it is like to run an agency.
“Our visit to Snapshot was the beginning of many experiences with networking and learning about the structure of an agency that this class gave me,” design communication senior Caleigh Furyk said. "Because of this experience, I learned about and attended a networking event at Snapshot a few months later as well.”
“While internships are so valuable for getting real-world experience, this class gives an experience where you can be more involved. It allows you to learn how to make decisions and handle things that go wrong rather than just following instructions,” Furyk said.
Interest meetings were offered to give prospective students a better understanding of the new course and some students were recruited by faculty members, specifically Assistant Professor of Design Dale Addy who is the faculty instructor of the course.
A mixture of new students and some from the initial cohort will be in the class next semester and two new clients have already been secured: a local photographer and an internal project. The agency is also working on securing a corporate campaign.
“We need all the work we can get,” Addy said. “We have a very talented team of students next semester, and I would love to break them down into smaller teams so we can take on even more work.”
The student agency class takes experiential learning a step further by creating a collaborative environment for students from different disciplines to function as a marketing agency where their decisions have executive weight as they work with real businesses in Nashville.
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