The Hilltop Ad Agency is Open for Business

“On a trip to London, I noticed that other universities had almost professional marketing and advertising clubs. I wanted to do something a bit more formal like that here — where we could build our portfolios and add real experience to our resumes,” she said.

The idea of creating an on-campus, student-run advertising agency came to her in April 2023. Yam’s first step? Ask  Marthinus JC van Loggerenberg, associate professor of advertising, and Julia Kirkland, assistant professor of advertising, what an agency would look like — what roles there were, how teams functioned together, how a project went from inception to completion — and whether he thought it would work at USF.

They did.

To gauge student interest in the project, Yam, an advertising and performing arts and social justice double major, sent out a form to friends in her advertising classes, and Professor van Loggerenberg sent it to students of design, communication studies, marketing, management, and media studies.

To Yam’s surprise, she received more than 50 responses. She published job descriptions for specific roles and students submitted applications with portfolios of projects they’d worked on in class, along with a description of the role they’d like to have in the agency. Yam accepted every one of them.

The goal is for members of the Hilltop Ad Agency to work on pro bono advertising projects in the community.

There are two types of membership: team members who work on projects and club members, who don’t have the time to devote to what amounts to a part-time job but who still want to participate in some way. Club members can join team members in attending workshops, partake in headshot day (where members sit for photos they can use on their LinkedIn profiles), and join tours of professional ad agencies like Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, a San Francisco advertising agency.

Yam met the director of talent at Goodby, Leslie Bee, in New York while Yam was attending a four-day industry immersion trip after being named among the USA's top 50 most promising multicultural students by the American Advertising Federation. She introduced herself to Bee and managed to secure a trip to the Goodby offices in San Francisco for the Hilltop Ad Agency members.

Van Loggerenberg said he is happy Yam established USF’s first on-campus advertising agency. “This paves the way for students to enhance their portfolios, forge new connections, help nonprofits and startups in the Bay Area, and represent USF in prestigious international advertising award shows,” he said.

Though she graduated May 19 and no longer runs the Hilltop Ad Agency, Yam said she would like to see it grow at USF.

Yam’s next step: She’d love to secure a job in UX for a tech agency — and she’d love to design an app.