Five seniors involved in a comprehensive advertising project for their senior advertising campaigns class were required to conduct a non-profit campaign for a local business.
They soon found themselves disgusted by the rampant dishonesty of their client.
The members of the group (Kenny Quirk, Meghan Williamson, Kasey Colucci, Kelly Bates and Jason Albury) was assigned to an organization calling itself International Women’s Health of North America (IWHNA), claiming to
be devoted to the prevention and treatment of STDs and other noble crusades.
The organization actively sought the services of the COM 583 class to help advertise, according to course instructor Dr. Gracieli Scremin.
“They contacted us for what seemed to be a legitimate campaign,” Scremin said.
From the start, though, the involved students experienced reservations about the integrity of their outwardly upright client.
The organization’s representatives were blatantly poor at responding to emails, hesitant in providing information and outright opposed to location visits from the project group.
This not only complicated the necessary research for the campaign, but made the students uneasy and suspicious.
Group member Kenny Quirk described a phone conversation between his group and a IWHNA representative.
“The day we had planned to go [visit the facility] she called and adamantly advised against us coming without first approving it with their CEO, who she informed me was out of the country and she wasn’t sure when he would
return…shady stuff,” Quirk said.
Meghan Williamson, a fellow participant in the project group, took it upon herself to drive by the facility and garner personal impressions about the organization.
She discovered, much to the group’s unease, that the building was labeled under the name of Women’s Center of Hyde Park.
As persistent researchers should, the group then began calling the different listed locations in search of IWHNA and found no promising leads.
Rather than organizations devoted to women’s health and the prevention of disease, the locations they found turned out to be something quite different.
“We found out these women’s centers were essentially first and foremost abortion clinics,” Quirk said. “Our group just had this long, collective moment of jaw-dropping.”
The proverbial icing on the cake for the frustrated researchers was their discovery of convicted criminals working within the organization.
“We also discovered that a former employee in high standing with these organizations was currently serving a near four year sentence in prison for extortion, and that their CEO, who was out of the country, was the USF
employee a few years back who sparked some legal trouble for stealing a bike to give to a homeless person,” Quirk stated.
Infuriated at being so blatantly deceived, the group cut ties with their client with the full blessing of their professor.
“We immediately terminated the relationship,” Scremin confirmed.
“Here at UT we believe in integrity.”
The time the wronged students wasted on the dead-end organization could have been problematic for the seniors on the cusp of graduation.
Sympathetic to her students’ dilemma, the instructor of the course allowed them to transfer their hard-earned research and effort to another campaign dealing with similar women’s health issues.
“The team did an excellent job. They won’t have to suffer for what happened,” said Scremin.
In hindsight, Quirk feels that the discouraging incident was something of a positive learning experience for the entire group.
In keeping with the viewpoint of a model UT student, he stated his relief in acting upon his moral impulse despite the extra work involved.
“I think this experience is a great one in the end, because it will go to show future employers and clients of ours in the professional aspect that when faced with an ethical dilemma, we made what we still believe is the right call…and I would argue that when it’s all said and done, that is the most important thing we will have learned from this whole experience,” Quirk said.
Jeffery Palmer can be reached at jeffrey.palmer@spartans.ut.edu