By Hannah Kakish.

Arrowhead Advertising is FSU’s award-winning advertising competition team that competes in the American Advertising Federation’s annual National Student Advertising Competition. This team has participated in the competition for about three decades. Barry Solomon, Arrowhead Advertising founder, shares the story behind this student-based agency and some memorable moments during this transformative time. 

“Around 1988, I said why don’t we just do this,” Solomon said. “I was the advisor for the Ad Club. I asked some students to do it, and I got four. Four people worked on the campaign that first year. The competition was in Gainesville. There were four teams, and we finished fourth.”  

By the mid-’90s, Solomon said he had established a for-credit course for the competition team. When the College of Communication and Information moved to the stadium, he secured a dedicated lab for the class. Students branded the team Arrowhead Advertising. And with students earning course credit for the year-long commitment, it became easier to get students involved. 

Over the next few years, the team started to grow. Solomon said he had to set a cap on enrollments. He learned that not everyone participated as much when the class size went over about 18 students. That’s when he started interviewing students interested in joining the team.

“I’d rather have 15 hard workers than 25 because you still had 15 hard workers and 10 who were just kind of there,” he said, adding that the team went through different phases as they got bigger. “We’d win three or four in a row [at the district level], and then we didn’t win for a few years.”

Every year before school started, Solomon arranged for the team to come in and decorate the Arrowhead lab, which was located on the fourth floor of the college. He said he wanted it to become their home for the year, so they had their own space for the year of hard work ahead. 

“Oftentimes, they would pull all-nighters there. It was very much set up as part dorm room, part office,” Solomon said. “Nothing else was allowed in there. I wanted it to be like an extended family.” 

The team did many things together outside of preparing for the competition. Every month, he asked the team captain to organize a group outing. He said it didn’t matter what it was — a team dinner or a tailgate party — so long as all members had the opportunity to get to know one another. 

Solomon said he ran the class as an agency. He told students the syllabus was a guideline but he couldn’t guarantee that they would be doing concept testing in the fourth week or have the big idea by the end of the fall semester. 

“But we ended up going to the national competition about 10 times,” he said. “The highest we finished was for a Chinese frozen food company, Tai Pei. The national competition was in New Orleans. We finished third.”

Arrowhead Advertising has evolved drastically from its humble beginning as a School of Communications course. It now is an award-winning program that functions as a student-run agency and proves to be an invaluable, immersive opportunity for all who participate in it. Barry Solomon has since retired from this position after teaching for 32 years alongside these budding advertising professionals. While the team continues to evolve and flourish from its roots, Barry Solomon’s place in the program will always serve as a reminder of where it all began. 

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Hannah Kakish, an advertising major at FSU’s School of Communication, wrote and edited this article for the team’s blog.