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A Little Too Personal?
MSNBC published a story last month on how a small college in Pennsylvania targeted seven prospective students through a $120,000 advertising campaign by plastering the students' names on billboards, pizza boxes and gas pumps, and even aired a commercial on MTV, all in hopes of getting the chosen few to enroll.
I don't get this campaign for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it could easily backfire. Very easily. You really have to play the privacy game in the US and this is treading a very thin line. I'd be pretty annoyed if I saw my name plastered everywhere, it's almost like a sort of identity theft.
Secondly, I can't understand why the college would spend $120,000 on an advertising campaign targeting seven prospective students (a staggering cost per acquisition of $17,143), no matter how smart they are. Unless your some local celeb and will attract a wave of admiring fans to also enroll, then I don't see how this can be a smart investment. I can think of better and more responsible ways to blow $120k on effective marketing.
Oh and while I'm at it, the creative's pretty poor too. The agency, 160over90, chose a Comic Sans look-a-like for the campaign. Yuk.
Briana Turnbaugh poses with a billboard with her name, placed by Wilkes University. Turnbaugh ultimately turned down Wilkes.
Posted on Sunday, 11 May 2008 at 7:23 PM | TrackBack: http://www.veedeepee.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/130
Comments
I tried to view the campaign in a little of a more positive light. When I was a senior in high school, I received information from more than 300 colleges, and after a while getting the mail became a chore and they all started to blend together.
If this was a large school that draws nationally for its student body I'd probably agree with you that it was wasted money, but the point of the campaign was they wanted to get more local students to consider staying around and going to Wilkes instead of the larger schools in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Certainly in a small town, word of the billboards would make it around fast and at the very least put Wilkes on students' radar who may not have considered it before.
Plus the school has a huge endowment, so $120,000 probably isn't that much. At the very least, reserve judgment until the incoming freshman data comes out and proves whether the campaign was a success.
Posted by Jeremy on Tuesday, 13 May 2008 at 12:21 AM