PROVO — A trip to Paris usually includes a whole list of fantastic sights to visit. Three Brigham Young University students determined to win an advertising contest pushed sightseeing down their list and it paid off.

BYU team members Jamie Bond, Zack Tolbert and Stanton Jones spent hundreds of hours refining their advertising presentation and won the Best Communication Campaign award last week at the L'Oreal Brandstorm competition in Paris.

"We were picked the best out of all 35 countries competing," Tolbert said.

The award didn't come until after some disappointment.

The presenter from L'Oreal announced the first-, second- and third-place winners, with the BYU group shut out.

"We didn't make those final awards," Tolbert said. "So we were feeling kind of down."

Then Maurice Levy, CEO of the world's fourth-largest advertising and communications company, Publicis Groupe, began to describe the team for the Best Communication Campaign award.

The group knew he was talking about them.

"Then we felt this burst of excitement again," Tolbert said.

Students from around the world competed to create an ad campaign for Redken for Men products.

The BYU ad team, named CRUX, came up with a creative way to solve a marketing problem.

"Our students said that people don't know about Redken products because they are only sold professionally," said Jeff Sheets, advertising lab faculty adviser and mentor to the group. "They used strategic thinking and planning to solve the crux of the problem."

The students invited a group of female advertising executives from the Publicis Groupe into a men's restroom to demonstrate how uncomfortable the women felt being there. They related that experience to men entering a beauty salon.

"The number one problem was that men don't go to salons," Sheets said. "You can't sell a product to people who don't go where it's sold."

Sheets said Levy thought the campaign was brilliant and that "one group really understood the issue."

The team won the national championship in March, competing in New York City against more than 200 university teams.

"Once we went to the national competition and actually won, it was a dream come true," Bond said. "The day after we got back from winning in New York we kept working and changed things to make it stronger."

Bond said while other teams made the rounds of Paris nightlife, they spent most of their time at their hotel.

"We just kept rehearsing our presentation," Bond said. "We wanted to dedicate most of our time to it."

All three praised the BYU advertising department for providing them the tools to succeed.

"BYU trained us what to do — it's our forte — that's what we won on," Jones said.

Tolbert echoed that sentiment.

"I credit a majority of the success we had to our BYU education, the morals we have and the BYU advertising lab," he said. "Deep down we knew we had what it took to be the best."

The trio earned other rewards for their efforts. All are working for L'Oreal in New York City — Tolbert in a full-time position and Bond and Jones as interns.

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E-mail: knelson@desnews.com