What If? Wins Two Tellys for Carnegie Mellon

What If?, the national television spot we made for Carnegie Mellon University, won two Telly Awards in 2024. The Telly judges awarded it Silver in Branded Content, General: Educational Institution. And the public voted it a People’s Telly Silver in General Branded Content.

The Tellys have honored video and television since 1979 and draw more than 13,000 entries a year from every US state and six continents. Standard categories are judged by the Telly Awards Judging Council, more than 250 executives from networks, agencies, studios and streaming platforms. People’s Telly categories are shortlisted by those judges and then decided by public vote. Both winner pages, the Silver and the People’s Telly Silver, credit Adam Sewell as Executive Producer, Johnny Andow as Director and Josh Acuff as Producer.

The brief: not another university anthem

Carnegie Mellon needed a visual asset strong enough to set the standard for its entire video brand. It knew exactly what it did not want: the familiar higher education anthem of drone shots over campus and three students under a tree.

The spot had to speak to prospective students by showing possibility instead of inventory, what a CMU student might go on to do rather than a tour of the buildings. And it had a hard national deadline: the Tony Awards broadcast.

A broadcast premiere sets a date that does not move. The spot had to be concepted, approved, shot, finished and delivered for air by a fixed night, and that shaped the schedule from the first concept meeting, including how much time each approval round could take.

Two concepts, one question

We brought university leadership two concepts. CMU’s president chose What If? because it matched the curiosity the university actually selects for.

Instead of aerial footage, we built intimate scenes of thinking, making and problem-solving inside the university’s walls, filmed on location at Carnegie Mellon: students at work, experimenting, performing, imagining. Every frame asks a question the way CMU students do. The concept gave the film its structure, and it gave the university a line it could keep using long after the broadcast.

Two Tellys, two kinds of proof

The categories are worth spelling out. The Telly judges’ category, General: Educational Institution, covers branded content created by or for the promotion of an educational institution, so What If? was judged against university and school work from around the world. The People’s Telly category, General Branded Content, covers content that promotes and is funded by a particular brand. Its entries are shortlisted by the judges, and the online public then chooses the Gold, Silver and Bronze winners.

The two awards say different things. The Silver came from industry judges, assessing the craft and the execution against branded content for educational institutions everywhere. The People’s Telly came from viewers with no stake in the university, choosing to rate it highly from a shortlist of strong work.

Winning both means the spot holds up to professional scrutiny and to an ordinary audience at the same time. For a brand film, that is the combination you want. We saw the same pattern two years later with InVue’s OnePOD Max launch, which won a Silver for 3D animation craft and a People’s Telly in 2026.

What What If? became

The spot premiered during the 2023 Tony Awards, on deadline. Carnegie Mellon regards it as the strongest visual asset the university has created, and it became the foundation of a full-scale ad campaign. The concept then evolved into “What’s Next,” expanding into the university’s cloud lab and beyond.

Melanie Schramm, CMU’s AVP of Marketing, put it this way: “The work delivered from Digital Spark served as the foundation for a full-scale ad campaign. Digital Spark’s ability to capture our institution’s essence and translate it into a compelling narrative was unparalleled.”

It went on to win a Silver ADDY in 2025 as well, which we cover in three Gold ADDYs and a Silver at the 2025 American Advertising Awards. The full story is on the What If? project page.

Also in 2024: a Silver ADDY for the Centrios Smart Lock

The same year, our launch film for the Centrios Smart Lock won Silver in Animation, Special Effects or Motion Graphics at the 2024 Charlotte American Advertising Awards. The credits are Joshua Hieber, Director; Adam Sewell, Executive Producer; and Josh Acuff, Producer.

Centrios, an ASSA ABLOY brand, needed to launch a smart lock for small businesses into a category full of friendly consumer smart home products. It had to feel strong rather than cute. So the film is an assembly: molten metal runs into the backplate and the housing closes around it, the lock clicks onto the door, and it takes rain, snow, heat and impact back to back. Then a lens change turns the hardware into a system, one phone managing many doors. The full film is on the Centrios Smart Lock project page. A year later, our animated explainer for the Centrios app went one better and won Gold.

What this means if you are choosing a partner

Awards are not the reason to hire a studio, but they are useful evidence that someone outside the room rated the work. What matters more is the pattern behind them: a clear brief, a concept chosen for the right reason, and a team that carries it through on a hard deadline. That is how we approach every video production and animation project.