by Bonnie Henderson

A decade from now, when the dangers of indiscriminate antibiotic use are as much a part of the national consciousness as the perils of cigarette smoking and drunk driving, you can thank the School of Journalism and Communication. Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention already have.

UO advertising students, meanwhile, thank instructor Ann Maxwell for a class that taught them as much about teamwork as it did about how to carry out a professional advertising campaign. And it taught them plenty about that.

The story begins in Atlanta, Ga., where former public relations professor Cindy Coleman spent a year working for the CDC while on leave from UO. She was recruited to work on a high-priority project to "promote judicious antimicrobial use to decrease the spread of resistance among community-acquired pathogens" -- essentially, to help us kick the antibiotics habit.

Not use of all antibiotics -- granted, they're miracle drugs. But according to the CDC, their widespread and often unnecessary or inappropriate use -- when, say, it's probably a virus that's causing your sore throat and cough, but you persuade the doctor that a course of antibiotics wouldn't hurt -- is leading straight toward a public health nightmare. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are proliferating; drug companies can't keep pace. For example, if resistance develops to Vancomycin, the last effective medicine for some strains of bacterial pneumonia, researchers predict we'll quickly see mortality rates for that disease return to pre-antibiotic era levels.

On a visit to Eugene last fall, Coleman described her work to her SOJC colleague, advertising professor Ann Maxwell. Coleman mentioned that the CDC needed some creative work to help communicate its key messages. With money being as tight at the CDC as everywhere else, Coleman was hoping to get some students to take on the project.

"At first I thought it would be a great thing for students in Atlanta to take on," Maxwell recalls. "Then, a day or two later, I thought, 'Why should we give that away?'"

In fact, it was a natural for the School. Maxwell teaches a senior-level course -- J448 Advertising Campaigns -- designed to help advertising students integrate and practice everything they've learned over the past four years. Real-life campaigns, particularly those with a public-service slant, have become a staple of the course. Former clients include St. Vincent de Paul, the Child Center, and the UO College of Education. Never before, however, had a class taken on a campaign with the national scope and importance of the CDC project.

In January, Maxwell met with the class, explained the project, handed out background materials, and divided the twenty-one students into three teams. Each team was to formulate a comprehensive communication plan incorporating advertising and possibly public relations and promotions. At term's end, each of the three teams -- who named themselves Team Plus, the Dream Team, and Seventh Wonder -- would make a formal audio-visual presentation of its plan to a panel of four judges: a pediatrician, a hospital marketing director, an advertising agency owner, and Coleman.

The result? "I can't speak positively enough about the whole experience," says Dr. Ben Schwartz, chief of the CDC's Childhood and Vaccine-Preventable Diseases Epidemiology section. "I was very impressed with the students' ability to understand the important issues and to develop a strategy and materials that addressed some of the key issues. Ann Maxwell did a terrific job; the students did a terrific job."

The Seventh Wonder team took the honors for best overall plan, but each team came up with ideas the CDC can -- and is planning to -- use. The students' ideas include:

• a cardboard block with key messages imprinted on each of its six sides (The CDC is now looking for funding to produce and distribute thousands of the blocks to parents in pediatricians' waiting rooms.);
• posters -- some 200,000 are being produced, again for pediatricians' offices; and
• an acronym -- C.A.USE (for Careful Antibiotic USE) -- has already been adopted as the new name for a quarterly newsletter the CDC sends to state health departments and professional medical societies around the country.

To help carry out the UO students' ideas, Seventh Wonder team member Mario Lombardo has been hired by the CDC as an intern this summer.

As valuable as the project was to the CDC, it was no less valuable to the students. It was a challenge. "It was as close as you could get to the real thing," says Su Lin Lim of Seventh Wonder. "It was really tough, but it was fun. This is the class where everything gets put together."

The stress of the project nearly overwhelmed Carter Theis of Team Plus, but he says Maxwell "made a special effort to encourage me and keep me going." Thanks in part to lessons learned from the class and to encouragement from Maxwell, Theis was recently accepted to the prestigious Pasadena Art Center College of Design. "Ann sees potential in people. She's probably the sole reason I'm going to go anywhere in life," says Theis, who now fully expects to become "a huge ad guy."

Faculty members of Maxwell's caliber are one reason that the School of Journalism and Communication is held in high regard by advertising executives throughout the country, according to Stephen Darland, executive vice president of J. Walter Thompson Worldwide in San Francisco. Not only has his firm hired a number of Oregon graduates, but Darland has made numerous visits to the UO himself. The students, alumni and faculty have all impressed him with their professionalism and creativity.

But there's something else, something from which J. Walter Thompson -- and now, the CDC -- have benefited. "Too often the preparation for work in marketing and advertising communications can create a jaded cynicism, as students are faced by really practical realities," Darland explains. "The thing about the UO is, though graduates arrive prepared and practiced to work, there's still a freshness about them that too often is lost. That freshness is at the heart of our business. When that's kicked out of them, they arrive like spoiled goods. That freshness is what characterizes UO graduates."