There is a version of advertising that lives in the cultural imagination. Sleek offices, happy-hours during lunches, and men in slim-cut suits who seem to arrive at genius by intuition alone. “Mad Men” put that image on screen and made it romantic. A lone creative staring out a window, then pitching a slogan that sells everything. The work looked like banter, coming to these characters with ease. 

Walk into The Lab on the fourth floor of the Dealey Center for New Media on a Tuesday evening, and the picture shifts immediately. There are no cocktails (the school definitely won’t allow it) or real-leather chairs. T here are students with laptops open across tables, jotting down feedback in real time, a vice president running through the agenda on a shared screen, and a debate about whether the activation is actually brief. The work is collaborative, iterative and visible to everyone in the room. That is the truth “Mad Men” never offered. 

Inside the school 

The Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin houses one of the more deliberately structured advertising and PR programs in the country. For students in the Stan Richards School of Advertising and Public Relations, the curriculum builds toward specialization through various concentrations. Texas Creative focuses on concepting and art direction. Texas Media and Analytics prepares students for planning and data-driven strategy. Texas Immersive offers production-forward work. For advertising and PR students specifically, everyone eventually converges in the upper-division classes, including Integrated Communications Campaigns, where students are expected to put everything together. It is the class that operates like a job, requiring students to build a comprehensive campaign for a real client. 

For students outside advertising and public relations, the structure may not be immediately obvious. The Lab is not a building or a lab in the scientific sense. It is a format and methodology that grew out of one professor’s refusal to let the capstone class feel like just another course. 

How it started 

Associate Professor of Instruction Liza Lewis has been teaching ICC at UT for roughly 20 years. The class itself predates The Lab by a significant stretch, and for most of that time it looked the way most advanced courses look. Students formed small teams of four or five to work together on a client brief or campaign. 

“At the time, ICC classes were structured very differently,” Lewis said. “Students were placed randomly into teams, and the classes could end up very uneven. You might have a class with no Texas Creative students, or very few PR students, or barely anyone focused on media. Then those small teams would compete against each other. But with only four or five people, you couldn’t really distribute the work the way a real agency does.” 

The shift began when Lewis agreed to lead UT’s National Student Advertising Competition (NSAC) team. The professor who had coached it for years had retired, and the program disappeared for nearly five years. Running a competitive NSAC team demands serious time and commitment, and no one had stepped in to revive it. Eventually, enough people asked Lewis that she agreed to bring it back on one condition. 

“I said yes, but only if I could try it my own way and experiment with the format,” she said. 

Her experiment was structural. Where most NSAC teams at other schools had five to 10 students, Lewis rebuilt the UT team to look like a mid-size agency. Departments, vice presidents, directors, defined roles across strategy, creative, media, and PR. The first team ran the Ocean Spray campaign. 

“Honestly, I didn’t know exactly how it would turn out,” she said. “It truly was an experiment.” 

The experiment produced results. UT’s Ocean Spray team won District 10. Judges commented afterward that the campaign demonstrated what a full communications platform built around a single strong idea should look like. For Lewis, the victory mattered less as a trophy and more as a confirmation that the model worked.

The students who went through it said as much. “After that first competition, they came to me and said, ‘Dr. Lewis, every ICC class should be taught this way,” she said. “The work is harder, and there are new challenges, but the results are so much better and we learn far more.’” 

That feedback became the foundation for The Lab. The department chair had been paying attention to the course reviews, to what NSAC had produced, and to the way Lewis was teaching. When a significant donation came in to build an agency-designed space within the school, she asked Lewis to bring other faculty on board and formalize the methodology. 

A full-day faculty meeting was held on a ranch about how the agency model would translate across different ICC sections. The faculty came to a conclusion. There would be a coaching system where faculty with specific expertise, whether it be creative, media or strategy, would work directly with the departments that corresponded to their backgrounds. The space and the system came together, and the name that stuck was The Lab. 

The name is intentional, and Lewis makes the point clearly: The work inside it is not meant to simulate finished products. The classroom literally serves as a laboratory for testing new ways to teach strategic communication. The campaigns students build are real in method, but the spirit behind the room is that trying something and getting it wrong is part of how the learning happens. 

Inside the room 

On a given evening in The Lab, the structure is visible without anyone having to explain it. Students sit with their departments. A VP running the meeting, following an agenda. A department presents work that will get feedback, some of it sharp. 

The difference between this and a traditional classroom is not just in the furniture arrangement. When a pitch goes up on screen, the people responding to it are not grading it. They are engaging with it. They ask whether the creative connects to the brief, how media and PR are thinking about the same problem. A faculty coach, when they are in the room, might stop the conversation and redirect it, the way a senior colleague would rather than the way a professor grades. 

Lewis describes the interpersonal dynamics of this environment as not incidental but essential. “Team dynamics, competing ideas, strong personalities are things that happen in real agencies,” she said. “Experiencing that environment as a student is incredibly valuable.” 

Learning another team member’s rhythm takes time. Working within a department and then coordinating across departments on the same project, where everyone owns a different area, means a lot of voices landing at once. Finding balance is its own skill, and it does not come automatically. What helps is that the people around you are working through the same adjustment. Lewis said each NSAC team develops its own culture, its own personality. The specific mix of people shapes how the room feels, and there is something in the pressure of a shared deadline that accelerates how a group learns to work. 

NSAC: A different level 

The Lab is the capstone. NSAC is what happens when students apply for a more intensive version of the same philosophy. 

The competition is an annual event run by the American Advertising Federation. Schools from across the country compete using a real client brief: a brand that releases a campaign challenge to participating universities. Past clients have included Tide, AT&T, Indeed and Tinder. Teams develop full, integrated campaigns and present to panels of industry judges at district and national levels. The stakes are genuine. Performing well at NSAC sends a signal to the industry that a school’s students can handle real-world campaign complexity under competitive conditions.

At UT, the NSAC team is not open enrollment. Students apply and interview for a spot. The process is selective, and that selectivity is part of what shapes the team’s culture. When you have earned your seat in the room, the sense that the work matters beyond a grade comes with it. 

“Every NSAC team has its dramatic moments. That’s normal,” Lewis said. “But those dynamics are part of the lesson because that’s how real agencies operate.” 

The NSAC team operates at a higher tempo. The brief is real, the timeline is fixed, and the competition is national. The agency structure Lewis introduced with that first Ocean Spray team is fully present, with departments, leadership roles, the coaching system, and client-level presentation standards. What makes NSAC distinct from regular Lab sections is not just the competition. It is the weight of representing the school and the self-selection of students who chose to take on that responsibility. 

The risk behind the structure 

The Lab did not arrive fully formed. Lewis is candid about the uncertainty involved in building it. 

The move to apply the agency model to all ICC sections, not just the NSAC team, came with real structural problems. Before The Lab existed as a dedicated space with a built-in system for recruiting a balanced cohort, some sections ended up lopsided. One class might have a single creative student. Another might have an overrepresentation of strong personalities that made collaboration difficult. 

“But even with those difficulties, I could see that the agency model was still better,” Lewis said. 

That is the nonobvious decision in the story of The Lab, through choosing to push forward with a methodology that was visibly imperfect rather than retreating to the version that worked predictably. The small-team format was easier to manage. The agency model was harder to run and harder to balance, and Lewis built it anyway because the learning it produced was more honest about what students would face. 

The Lab is also self-funded. Lewis’ role includes bringing in clients whose partnerships and contributions support the program’s operating costs: staff, campaign budgets, the infrastructure that lets students work on real briefs with real resources. Managing that is a significant part of what running The Lab actually involves, and it is not the part that shows up in the classroom. 

What Students Take With Them 

Lewis puts her philosophy plainly: “I always put students first. Everything I do is meant to prepare students for whatever they choose to do after UT — whether that’s agency life, working on the client side, government, or something completely different.” 

Students who have come through the Lab and NSAC consistently report a shift in how they approach professional environments. The before is familiar to most people who have taken upper-division coursework. Tasks are divided cleanly, work completed individually, and deliverables are submitted with little pushback between group members. The after looks different. By the end of an ICC or NSAC semester, students are defending strategic decisions in front of their peers, coordinating across departments on shared work, and thinking about how their piece of the campaign connects to every other piece. They are not just completing assignments. They are operating as professionals inside a structure that demands it. 

“Many of those students are now mid-level or senior managers,” Lewis said of her early NSAC cohorts, “and they still tell me that experience in that agency-style environment prepared them ahead of their peers in the workplace.” 

The Lab teaches campaign execution, but Lewis said a deeper skill is harder to measure: problem-solving. She centers her teaching on helping students analyze challenges and accept feedback. Working through the friction of group projects builds resilience. 

Lewis takes the concept of problem-solving further. Solving genuine problems by identifying root causes remains the skill that transfers from advertising into every other field. 

“People often confuse symptoms with problems,” she said. “Once you understand the underlying issue, you can build meaningful solutions. That ability applies not just to advertising or PR, but to any career. And even to relationships and everyday life.” 

The name “The Lab” is the point. It was meant to describe a posture toward work, one in which the output is not the only thing worth measuring: That the process of trying, iterating and adjusting is where the learning actually accumulates. 

What Comes Next 

The pop-culture myth of the effortless pitch ignores the real work required to connect with an audience. True communication relies on navigating endless variables and testing multiple hypotheses. Life itself presents a series of continuous experiments. The skills The Lab develops, including listening past your own assumptions, making decisions without complete information, working through disagreement toward something useful, do not just stay inside a campaign brief. 

The question worth sitting with is not whether you should take the class or apply for NSAC. It is a more personal one: When is the last time you tried something before you knew how it would turn out? 

That is what The Lab is actually practicing.