2 Students Turned November Into Brandsgiving With These Fun Ad Mockups

How do you show brands you're grateful for them? If you're Cat DeLong and Micah Wilkes, creative directors for the Brigham Young University AdLab, a student-run, professionally-mentored ad agency, you spend November producing creative for 30 brands.

Their project, Brandsgiving, is simple: Pick 30 brands you love, then each day randomly select one and spend an hour developing art and copy that conveys its message.

Drawing inspiration from Communication Arts magazine and Brent Anderson, creative director of TBWA\Media Arts Lab, the pair wanted to create visual expressions for brands representing a variety of industries and styles. The project would improve their abilities to generate and produce work at a clip that's standard for a professional in the industry.

As for how they split the work—DeLong is the copywriter of the duo while Wilkes, who has a passion for typography, design and illustration, does the design for each piece.

The team is especially proud of the work it did for Jif and Delta (see below), as well as TruMoo. "We felt they were on brand, but coming at their brand from a totally different angle," they said. "It would have been really easy to create a whole campaign for them because they were strategically smart."

They plan on submitting their favorites to Comm Arts and other brief shows, as well as using them in portfolios for competitions like One Show to vie for a coveted Pencil award.

With graduation right around the corner, they've attended Advertising Week in New York and have a trip planned to Los Angeles in December to meet with various agencies. "I think we were especially fond of Wieden+Kennedy New York, Droga5 and McCann Erickson New York," DeLong said. "So if you are from those agencies and reading this, just know someone has a secret ad crush on you."

When they land jobs in the industry, their ambitions are simple, "make awesome work that matters and makes people smile."

But before then, there's still a week of November left, which means another week of Brandsgiving. They have more brands in mind, but they're open to suggestions if brands reach out to them and want them to tackle their message.

The duo will send each company featured in Brandsgiving its work on Thanksgiving via Twitter. Click here to see all of their Brandsgiving work.