By Abby Cloud. 

Andrianna “Andi” Paniucki discovered her passion for advertising through the Arrowhead team after a chance encounter in her intro to advertising class. Little did she know how much it would impact her time at FSU and her future as a graduate.

When Andi first came to FSU, she had no idea what she wanted. Her major jumped from pre-med to psychology to exploratory while she searched for her future at FSU. “When I met with my counselor, I just told them I wanted to be creative, you know? And he suggested the Advertising program to me.”

Andi dipped her toes into the program by taking Principles of Advertising with Arrowhead advisor and head of the advertising department, Barry Solomon. It was Solomon who brought the Arrowhead team to Andi’s principles of advertising class to practice for their presentation at the national competition.

“I was like, ‘This is probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever gotten to watch and witness’. I remember thinking, ‘I have to do this’.”

Andi served on the 2019-2020 Arrowhead team creating a plans book for their client Adobe. During the fall semester she conducted research with the survey team, transitioning to events for the spring. Andi then worked throughout fall 2020 as director of the survey team, laying the groundwork for their Tinder plans book.

Her first fall on the survey team Andi and her teammates worked to create surveys that would appeal to and grab the attention of their audience of “C-Levels,” the senior executives and directors in the business world.

“We had to think outside of the box for how we were going to reach our audience. We had to be really creative in the ways we created our questions to get answers, but also keep it short and simple to make sure it wasn’t taking up their time.”

Her inaugural spring with the Arrowhead team was spent on the events team, where last semester’s research came to fruition. With their client Adobe having such a powerful and intentional presence, Andi and her team worked to craft numerous experiential events. They envisioned several scenarios in which their target audience would interact with Adobe, with a big question at the forefront of her thoughts.

“What’s going to differentiate Adobe from everyone else that’s there?”

The events used for Adobe’s plans book included various programmatic ideas that worked to create personalized and individual experiences for each audience member. Andi and her peers worked hard to grasp the nature of their clients and discover what they were looking for.

 

“Arrowhead is a bunch of teamwork, there’s never just one person. Even though you have the [directors] of your team, we have to work together to make this campaign. No one person can do that by themselves.”

 

The team’s dedication and perseverance paid off. They were selected as one of eight teams invited to the finals of National Student Advertising Competition.

From Arrowhead to employment

Ahead of her graduation in fall 2020, Andi used the interactive and real-world experiences she gained throughout Arrowhead as inspiration for her job search.

“Just getting to see how different it was from being at an internship and the experience you got through Arrowhead, I knew what I was going to take away from it would be so unique that it would help me when I was looking for jobs,”

A Chicago native, Andi figured once she had a degree from FSU she would start working in a huge advertising agency in Chicago doing, as Andi says, “creative and different things”. However, Andi remained in Tallassee after marrying and is now using her degree in a new environment.

“It’s a different world,” Andi said, adding that searching for a job straight out of college is difficult and doing so in a smaller town during an international pandemic is even harder. In a sea of political and sales employment, which didn’t fit too snug in Andi’s advertising expertise, she came across a listing for an accounting firm in town called Thomas Howell Ferguson P.A. CPAs.

“They have a smaller marketing team consisting of four people total,” Andi said. “We divide the work based on the different industries addressed by the firm, including insurance, tax, government, and more.”

Andi works on the company’s social media presence. She also works in development, working to bring more business in for the government consulting services sector of the company. And she has had the opportunity to work on some events and conferences, where she draws from experiences on the Adobe team.

“It’s a whole mix of different things,” Andi said.”But what I took away from Arrowhead was huge.”

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Advertising major at FSU’s School of Communication, Abby Cloud talked with Andrianna Paniucki about her experience preparing for the 2020-’21 competition. 

Axel Lagergren, advertising major at FSU’s School of Communication, edited this article for the team’s blog.