Recent UW-Madison graduates win award for strategic media plan

As recent University of Wisconsin–Madison graduates hoping to land jobs in political and strategic communications, Dana Vielmetti and Paige Helling this week found themselves in an enviable position.

The pair was in Washington, D.C., networking with influential political and media industry players after winning a major national award for strategic political communication.

Vielmetti, who graduated in May with degrees in political science and psychology, and Helling, who earned degrees in journalism and political science, won the 2011 Washington Media Scholars Media Plan Case Competition and National Excellence in Media Award for the strategic media plan they created for a hypothetical special election referendum.

The award is given by the Washington Media Scholars Foundation, which gives college students first-hand experience in public policy advertising and offers them the chance to meet leaders in the industry. The pair comprised one of six teams chosen as finalists from across the country to be part of a Media Scholars Week and compete for the national award.

“It was a great experience learning how to present and hold your own among professionals,” says Helling, of Orono, Minn. “It was almost like a weeklong job interview, but you’re learning a lot, too.”

In addition to the invaluable connections they made in Washington, Vielmetti and Helling will each receive a $3,000 scholarship for winning the contest.

In this year’s case, Vielmetti and Helling represented a company with a significant financial interest in a referendum and were tasked with encouraging voters to vote “no.”

The students received complex, detailed data on political attitudes and how they related to print, cable and broadcast television, outdoor advertising and Internet audiences.

Their job was to target the best audiences for the campaign, ensuring the best payoff for the ad budget while also avoiding doing too much to stimulate those opposed to the referendum, says political science professor Charles Franklin, who worked with the pair as they prepared for the contest.

“Paige and Dana brought analytic rigor to the art of campaign advertising,” Franklin says. “Their quantitative analysis of audiences and political attitudes provided a campaign strategy that converted a losing campaign into a likely winner.”

Helling and Vielmetti put together a written report this spring. Their work earned them the trip to the finals, where they presented their strategy to a panel of six judges from the industry.

“Even if we hadn’t made it to the finals we would have had this awesome project for a portfolio,” says Vielmetti, of Mequon, Wis. “It was a great way to end (college) and then to start off in a career, because I now have these connections.”

Political science professor Ken Goldstein, who also worked with the team, says the students’ success highlights the training they received at UW–Madison. Franklin says the political science department emphasizes the value of quantitative analysis applied to political campaigns.

“We’ve put in place a series of classes which not only give students substantive information about political science and American government, but really try to give them analytical skills,” Goldstein says. “The case was really hard, but they had those analytical tools to be able to do it.”

While at UW–Madison, Vielmetti was the recipient of the Bill and Marge Coleman Undergraduate Research Fellowship, intended to give undergraduates more opportunities to do research. She and Helling both produced research for “Office Hours,” a UW–Madison show for the Big Ten Network that highlights work of UW–Madison experts.

The Media Plan Case Competition is only 2 years old, and UW–Madison is the only university to have a team among the finalists in both years. In 2010, Dillon Lohmer and Roshni Nedungadi represented UW–Madison.

Other institutions represented with finalists in the competition have included the University of Virginia, Washington University, the University of Montana, Michigan State University, Arizona State University, Indiana University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Helling says she’s working to land a job in Washington, D.C., while Vielmetti plans to teach English in Japan for a year before heading to the nation’s capital herself.

One thing the pair found reassuring: the number of Badgers they encountered in Washington, D.C.

“Every place we went, there was someone with Wisconsin connections,” Vielmetti says.