CSUSB Students Win Big
By |Tiffiny Gaston|
In the fall of 2012, Toyota and Scion of
San Bernardino approached the Communication Studies Department with a tantalizing proposition: invite teams of communication studies students to script a television commercial for the car dealership. The prize? The winning team would receive $2000 and get to produce the commercial for cable television.
Five self-organized teams signed up for the challenge. After nearly six months of competition, the managers at Toyota picked two teams as finalists.
For secrecy, the teams worked in different locations as they developed and produced two thirty-second commercials.
On April 23, 2013, after many months of writing, editing, and producing, Toyota of San Bernardino awarded the grand prize to the team of Wesley Ryan Davenport, Amy Wassing, Tavon Harris, Scott Marinis, Renee Barlin, David Nguyen, and Kimberly Treloar.
“We were shocked and thrilled when we won,” says Renee Barlin, one of the PR majors on the team.
“We beat out 30 other people,” Kimberly Treloar acknowledges. “Many of those students had a lot more experience than we did.” Treloar notes that the majority of her teammates are public relations majors, “and we really did not know much about filming or editing.”
After the storyboards were presented and the finalists were announced, Treloar’s team was combined with a group of individuals who major in digital and media communication. “I think that made all the difference,” says Treloar. “We had the ideas, but our media guys really knew how to put it all together. They were fantastic.”
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