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National Student Advertising Competition

This guide will help scratch pad students competing in the National Student Advertising Competition.

Market Research Reports

Mintel Academic is one of several companies that sell market research reports. The company designs online surveys, analyzes the data, and writes a report that summarizes the attitudes or behaviors of consumers who have a shared identify (e.g., Gen Z) or might buy different products or services (e.g., mobile network providers). 

Data & Statistics

These tools aggregate data from other information authors. They are more likely to be charts or infographics instead of in-depth reports, like Mintel.

Both can be searched for information about your client (Gen Z) or services (4G and 5G Wireless Users by Company, such as AT&T).

Insider Intelligence also has insights into ad spending and ROI.

Scholarly Articles

Scholarly articles present the findings of studies designed by experts (aka professors) to figure out why consumers behave in certain ways. These articles can be dense and hard to understand, but usually you're looking for the section titled practical or managerial implications. This section summarizes how the researcher thinks their findings will apply in real-world settings, like your case competition. 

Scholarly articles often have smaller sample sizes than the market research reports that Mintel publishes, which can make these articles harder to generalize to larger groups. Still, they might give you ideas for strategies you could tap into for your campaign.

Here are a couple of examples of recent articles about marketing to Gen Z:

JMU Libraries subscribes to three databases that have scholarly articles on marketing and advertising topics:

I recommend trying these keywords/terms in different combinations to find articles that might be relevant.

  • market * OR brand* OR advertis*
  • "generation z" OR "gen z"
  • "consumer behavior" OR "consumer attitudes" OR "consumer preferences"
  • loyalty OR satisfaction
  • Wireless Telecommunications Carriers

New to searching?

This tutorial shows how to search effectively and efficiently in Business Source Complete. The other databases I recommended operate the same way, so you can apply these strategies in those, too.

Scholarly articles can be intimidating to read. These resources explain what makes scholarly articles different from other articles and suggests tips for reading them and understanding their findings.

Advertising Data & Campaigns

These resources cover the advertising industry. Search them for trends, statistics about ad agencies or ad spending by industry, or for example campaigns.

Tips for Getting the Best Info from Marketing Databases

JMU Libraries has created several tutorials in Google Slides to help students use our specialized business resources.

Click on the name of the database to open the tutorial that shows how to search for data and cite the information you find in APA style.