The School of Business proudly hosted the first virtual USPS Direct Effect™ Innovation Challenge on Friday, November 13th, 2020. The Direct Effect Innovation Challenge is a one-of-a-kind event that brings together teams of college students for one day to design and develop integrated marketing campaigns in response to a real-life business case. Through the immersive, hands-on event the students gained experience in designing and implementing a marketing campaign to combine digital and traditional marketing channels: skills they will carry forward into the classroom and their careers.
The Direct Effect Innovation Challenge offers students an opportunity to design a campaign concept for a live client. This year the students worked with Mohawk, one of the most innovative paper companies in the world. Industry professionals from USPS, HP, Amazon, and RRD Marketing joined the event as panel judges and experts to offer more understanding on integrated marketing as a core skill for every industry.
The challenge brought together 30 students from seven colleges located from Philadelphia to Nebraska, connected through the virtual platform. It was truly a multidisciplinary collaboration event. Ten Farmingdale students from Business Management, Virtual Communication, Computer Programming and Information System, and Economics formed the teams. Farmingdale did indeed have a team win the “Best Overall Campaign”.
Dr. J. Betty Feng from our Business Management led the overall effort to plan and organize the first Direct Effect Innovation Challenge virtual event. Dr. Feng states “the Virtual Innovation Challenge is truly a multidisciplinary collaboration and an innovation to engage students through a virtual environment. We turned the challenge of remote learning into an opportunity to connect college students from different geographic locations. The virtual innovation challenge is a wonderful model to get our students interacting with their peers outside Long Island, New York, and even outside the United States in the future.”