An environmental advertisement campaign designed by a group of Northwestern students has been running in newspapers, magazines and on the radio throughout the summer, after the students won a national advertisement contest Spring Quarter.

NUBrand, NU’s chapter of the American Advertising Federation, won first prize in the Cleaner and Greener Environment Program’s contest, which challenged students to design a campaign to raise consumers’ awareness of environmentally friendly companies.

NUBrand won the overall competition for an integrated campaign in print and radio advertising and placed first in the print advertisement category.

“The theme of our campaign was ‘It’s your future, hold on to it’,” said NUBrand President Ethelbert Williams, a Medill senior. “We wanted to present a campaign that would show consumers that the Earth is their future to hold on to.”

The award-winning print ad features a pregnant woman holding her belly, on which a silhouette of the Earth is superimposed. And one of the radio ads features the sound of children playing in the background, while a woman’s voice asks parents to ensure their children’s future by paying attention to the environment.

“The challenge was to define who the target consumer was,” Williams said. “We felt that mothers between the ages of 25 and 50 would be most interested in looking for cleaner and greener products because they were more concerned with the health of their (families).”

Williams said gaining recognition for the ads was much more important than winning the boom box that came with the award.

“There is no undergraduate advertising program at Northwestern, so this group really breathed more knowledge into us than we’d had before,” he said. “We really surprised a lot of people by winning.”

The ad campaign will air throughout the fall, although not on any Chicago-area media outlets, Williams said.