“College gets messy, but your car shouldn’t have to be.”
In the Spring of 2026, I took SMAD 342: Advertising Campaigns taught by Professor Matt Leech. This class had a series of assignments that involved a randomly selected target audience through a spinning wheel. My group mates, Julia Gray, Gabby Glasco, Maddie Scassa, and I chose the brand Hang 10 Car Wash (the location specifically on South Main St.), to work with for this project. Upon spinning the wheel, our target audience selected was “a busy JMU student with a side hustle to help pay tuition.”
This assignment specifically called for the production of a commercial and radio advertisement as the final deliverables, and our creative process can be illustrated below. To get a better view, a link to our Figma board can be found here.
Creative Brief, Research, and Persona
To start this project off, my group and I conducted some background research on Hang 10 Car Wash to put into a creative brief. We also did secondary research that involved the consideration of the “5 C’s”: Consumer, Category, Channels, Company, Competitors. Finally, some members did some primary research and went onsite to the car wash location to go through the experience and take notes about what they observed. The research is presented in the images below as well as a persona we developed:
Creative Approach, Inspiration, and Script & Storyboard Drafts
After getting our research, we started to develop our creative concepts. To start, we all pitched ideas for commercial direction and radio script copy, but eventually we split into groups, and Maddie and I took on production for the radio ad. At the same time, Gabby and Julia filmed and edited the commercial. Our creative rationale, inspiration board, and my script & storyboard drafts are below:
After we presented our overall concept and got feedback from a class critique, we started to develop our roughs for the deliverables. The group had a goal of presenting Hang 10 as a treat to a busy student’s week. If you think about it, many people on the go tend to use their cars like a moving storage unit, allowing things to pile up and get messy, while creating even more stress for a busy student. We wanted Hang 10 to be the solution to a situation like this.
Roughs and Strategy for Radio Ad
After we presented our overall concept and got feedback from a class critique, we started to develop our roughs for the deliverables. The group had a goal of presenting Hang 10 as a treat to a busy student’s week. If you think about it, many people on the go tend to use their cars like a moving storage unit, allowing things to pile up and get messy, while creating even more stress for a busy student. We wanted Hang 10 to be the solution to a situation like this.
When creating the radio ad, I did further research on Gen Z and their digital advertising and buying habits to help further my creative process. I discovered that Gen Z loves influencer marketing versus traditional advertisements because they value authenticity. This fact set off a lightbulb idea in my head. As a social media lover, I knew that I was home to some popular lifestyle influencers, one of those people being a girl named Chloe Van Berkel. Chloe is a popular influencer who markets herself as a ‘big sister,’ frequently sharing advice on life, dating, school, and her opinions on various brands. Many students who go to JMU have seen her videos through their Tiktok ‘For You’ page or Instagram ‘Explore’ pages.
Chloe’s social media links:
The strategy behind this was to make it sound like we are watching one of her Tiktoks she would normally create. I also wanted to make sure the music used had a strong and confident tone to it, to back the strong quality of Chloe’s voice, but also have it sound fun and energetic to match the vibe of Hang 10. Trying to find a balance between both brands was now a new challenge, but it was not too hard considering Hang 10’s vibrant colors, music, and friendly staff made Gen Z feel at home.
Since I found a link between the impact of influencer marketing of Gen Z and a perfect JMU public figure, I thought, “what if I messaged her to ask her to be the spokesperson of our ad?” And sure enough, she said yes. From there, I drafted a new script with the help of using AI to help me analyze her content, and find the top words and phrases she uses in her videos, so I can implement them into the script and actually make it sound like her.
We also wanted to make sure we had some sound effects to help the audience visualize the scene of the car wash in their heads. We tried to think of car wash sounds like water, bubbles, and some sounds of nursing ambience and notification sounds to match the copy of the script, which will be seen below.
For the drafted script, I underlined the phrases that AI gave me that she uses frequently. I also left it unformatted, because I wanted it to be easy for Chloe to read normally once we were able to meet with her.
Final Deliverables
After presenting the roughs for the class, we delivered a final presentation along with our final deliverables. The presentation, radio ad, and commercial are all attached below.
All sound effects and music used were from Storyblocks, and all videos were filmed by Gabby and Julia*
