Competition Timeline
Round 1 - Verification of Team Information
You are required to verify specific team information prior to moving forward to Round 2 in challenge.
Begin working on your marketing campaign prior to the Round 2 Evansville Regional Airport Executive Q&A session. Utilize the marketing challenge information provided on the competition main page to guide your efforts. The more work you have completed prior to the Q&A session, the better you can leverage the Q&A session.
- Update Applications
- 12-Oct-2016 06:00 AM to 17-Oct-2016 11:59 PM
- Judging
- 18-Oct-2016 06:00 AM to 19-Oct-2016 11:59 PM
Round 2 - Evansville Regional Airport Executive Q&A session
You are required to attend an Evansville Regional Airport Executive panel Q&A session. The session will be held at Evansville Regional Airport. This is a mandatory session to better understand the marketing challenge needs of the client and to ask important questions of the client. You and your team will receive further details for this session via email.
- Update Applications
- 26-Oct-2016 04:30 PM to 26-Oct-2016 06:30 PM
- Judging
- 27-Oct-2016 06:00 AM to 31-Oct-2016 05:00 PM
Round 3 - Pre-judging Pitch
This pre-judging round is for judges to assess your work, dilligence, and pitch skills completed to this point. Your goal here is to impress and intrigue the judges to vote you and your team through to the final round. You must upload your Power Point and pitch. Your pitch has a maximum time of twelve minutes. We recommend you and your team utilize Zoom to create your pitch presentation: http://zoom.us, and upload the recorded pitch/zoom video on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com.
You will then upload a link by the pre-judging deadline for judges to access and view your pitch.
You and your team will then be notified via email if you will move on to the final round. If your team is selected to move forward, you will receive pre-judging feedback via email to assist in your final pitch preparations.
- Update Applications
- 09-Nov-2016 06:00 AM to 10-Nov-2016 06:00 PM
- Judging
- 10-Nov-2016 07:00 PM to 12-Nov-2016 11:59 PM
Round 4 - Final Pitch
You are required to present a final marketing challenge pitch to an executive judging panel. The pitch has a maximum time of twelve minutes followed by five minutes of Q&A and is to be a live pitch utilizing Power Point.
You and your team will receive further details for this final pitch session via email.
- Update Applications
- 18-Nov-2016 04:30 PM to 18-Nov-2016 06:30 PM
- Judging
- 19-Nov-2016 06:00 AM to 21-Nov-2016 05:00 PM
Times are in CDT (-0500)

USI-Evansville Regional Airport Marketing Challenge
USI-Evansville Regional Airport Marketing Challenge is open to all currently registered USI students in any major.
Rules
1. All applications must be submitted in English.
2. All team members must be currently registered USI students.
3. To participate, you do not have to have a team. You can go solo.
4. Team Applications will be accepted now until the deadline on Monday, October 17, 2016. Only one person needs to submit the initial log in/register application. The team leader can then invite their team members, which will send them an email message and ask them to create a profile to check out the application. All deadlines are in (CDT).
5. After completing your initial team application, there will be three more rounds of the challenge requiring updated deliverables/applications. Each round is a judging "gate" to determine whether or not your team continues to move forward to the next round.
Goal of Challenge
Your challenge is to develop an original marketing campaign to capture more of the air travel market share for Evansville Regional Airport. Yes, this is very broad in scope. But, this is your challenge. You need to create a campaign that is specifically focused to grow travel market share. You need to determine what demographics and why, what media to employ and why, etc. Think of Evansville Regional Airport as your client, and you are going to pitch them a campaign for travel share growth. Start working immediately on your research so you will be adequately prepared for the Round 2 Q&A session with Evansville Regional Airport executives. This will be the opportunity to ask questions and converge your ideas, research, and overall campaign before Round 3.
Judges
The winners will be selected by a panel of judges who are looking at a range of criteria including market share growth potential, passion, creativity, level of marketing campaign development (messaging, branding, and advertising mediums used to deliver content), "Wow Factor", and your pitching skills. Each judge’s score is weighed equally.
Prizes
1. $500 cash prize to winning team.
2. Internships at the Evansville Regional Airport to two of the students of the winning team (Members of the winning team will be interviewed by an executive team from Evansville Regional Airport, individually, to determine the internship recipients).
Final winner(s) will be determined during Global Entrepreneurship Week: November 14-20, 2016.
To Have a Chance at Winning
Create a competitive marketing campaign to:
- Increase Evansville Regional Airport's air travel market share
Make sure your campaign has:
- Relevant components of a sales and marketing plan
- A timeline to market
Design a campaign with:
- Messaging, branding, and advertising mediums to deliver content
- Visual renderings
- Graphics will help sell your idea
- Rendering of what campaign looks like in action is a plus
- Creative elements
- Can you add video of your campaign being tested?
- Do you have ideas for extensions to the campaign?
Think of all your customers:
- Purchase influencers
- Purchase decision makers
Keep the competition in mind:
Research the existing competition - for example, what are competitors in the market doing. Understand the experience of passengers who use alternative airports in the region.
Make a great pitch:
There is much information available online for making a great pitch. From these resources, extract what is relevant to the pitch you need to make to your client; Evansville Regional Airport.