Here’s to you…

Here’s to you, UCLA alum and astronaut Anna Lee Fisher.

Diary of a marketing maverick

For close to a decade we have had the distinct pleasure of working with one of the most strategic and innovative marketers in the world of higher education. His name, like his risk tolerance is uncommon: Sundar Kumarasamy. He is the Vice President for Enrollment Management and Marketing at the University of Dayton, and in addition to being a long-time friend and client of 160over90, he is constantly going against the grain in an industry often riddled with clichés.

But don’t take our word for it.

In addition to being featured in a Forbes article alongside Steve Cannon, vice president of marketing for Mercedes-Benz USA, Sundar, in collaboration with the agency, was also featured by Adobe, discussing our development of the first fully interactive university viewbook iPad application, which utilized Adobe’s digital publishing suite software. And now, The Chronicle of Higher Education has written a feature article documenting his unique and sometimes controversial approach to higher education marketing.

Published on New Year’s Day, highlights from the article include:

The mesmerizing “mission wall” sprang from Mr. Kumarasamy’s head, which may or may not contain humming wires and hot circuits. He’s a fast-thinking marketer who seeks a precious share of teenagers’ attention even as he tries to distinguish his university’s mission, its intangible heart, in a world immersed in shallow slogans.

Case Study UD from Flightphase on Vimeo.

“This could have been a six-figure mistake,” says Sundar Kumarasamy of the custom-built “mission wall” he designed for the U. of Dayton’s welcome center. The wall is meant to convey the importance of community—and to grab teenagers’ famously fleeting attention.

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Imagining a New Brand

Early on, Mr. Kumarasamy hired a Philadelphia-based marketing firm, called 160over90, to help redesign the university’s viewbook, in which photographs of the campus chapel’s ivy-covered walls had long figured prominently. The new version, unveiled in the fall of 2007, was fresh and edgy, full of questions (“Where do you find faith?”), and images striking and strange. Perhaps none was as memorable as the photograph of two bare-shouldered blonde women emblazoned with the question: “Do you know more about Lindsay Lohan than Darfur?”

To say the least, some faculty members and students hated each of the viewbook’s 84 pages. The campus newspaper, the Flyer News, dubbed the publication a “glossy orgy” that reflected poorly on Dayton.

Although the viewbook marked a break with tradition, Mr. Kumarasamy believed that it also expressed—in fresh, bright colors—the university’s Marianist values, which he had studied carefully. A Marianist maxim says “New times call for new methods,” and that has become his own mantra.

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A Changing Campus

As another week begins at Dayton, the fall recruitment cycle is in full swing. On this Monday morning, applications are up by 1,000 over the same date last year.

Since 2002, applications have increased to 11,567 from 7,496. Enrollment of out-of-state students has increased to 48 percent from 35 percent. Average ACT scores are up, and so are retention rates.

All those numbers, Mr. Curran believes, reflect Dayton’s inherent strengths, but he credits Mr. Kumarasamy with finding clever answers to a million-dollar question: “How do you get people to look at you?”

‘We Compete for Memory’

Enrollment management is often described as the balance between marketing and mission. At religious institutions, where morality and social justice are typically everyday concerns, that tension is especially pronounced. Mr. Kumarasamy takes seriously the framed copy of the pledge on his bookshelf; in it, he vowed to remain “spiritually present, alive and open to the call [of] the Marianist charism and mission.”

Still, he is blunt about the necessity of market¬ing muscle. “If you have 10 shops on the same street selling Chinese food,” he says, “how do you think each shop should behave? Unfortunately, it’s an over¬crowded marketplace in this noble industry. If we shouldn’t compete, we should be prepared to go out of business one day.”

Dayton, he believes, owes visitors a unique experience, a feeling they can take with them. “We are living in a time when we compete for memory,” he says of colleges. “If their journey doesn’t begin the moment they first arrive on the campus, when does it begin?”

In Mr. Kumarasamy’s own story lies the enigma of the right fit. He says: “It’s more of a feeling, a silent voice that says, ‘This is where I belong.’ It’s not easily quantifiable. How do you give evidence about falling in love?”

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It Starts With Eating Lightbulbs

Each year, our holiday party has an exciting theme. One year it was snakes. Tonight’s pretty much revolves around this. Warning: BLOOD LOTS OF BLOOD!

No, Kutztown, when we get younger we want to be like you

A couple weeks ago, fellow designer Doug & I gave an agency talk and tour to design students from Kutztown University. And yesterday, we received this thank-you gem in the mail…

You Kutztown kids did a fine job of imitating us for this poster photoshoot, we must say. Despite all the time that Doug & I spend crafting our ~*~signature looks~*~, apparently we can each be simplified for parody purposes:

Doug — a mustache.
Me — glasses & a scarf.

Above: side-by-side comparisons of a couple of our favorite student impersonators vs. THE REAL THING. (We couldn’t do a real-time comparison because Doug shaved off his mustache last week. THANKS, DOUG.)

Thank YOU, Kutztown! Hope to see your internship applications filling up our inbox ASAP.

The League of A.W.E.S.O.M.E.

There are plenty of college acceptance packages that are built to exist in forgotten storage boxes and anxious garbage bins. Tired design, stuffy copy and a nasty habit of taking themselves too seriously. They offer facts, but no soul. No standout-ed-ness. Open, read and discard.

I think moments like this deserve more than that.

With “The League of A.W.E.S.O.M.E.” poster, the thinking was to make something more. To look past “expected” and see, well, “awesome.” The superhero-ness of Wilkes’ mascot guided us to the idea of a silver age inspired comic featuring The Colonel and his trusted sidekicks (one representing each of Wilkes’ fields of study and the Athletics department).

18 inches x 36 inches of youth, humor, power, tradition, and community all wrapped in a whole new way to see an acceptance package.

This is to remembering college is fun.
Dorm room walls rejoice!

Whoo WHOOOO! All aboard for Newport Beach

A lot of us here at 160over90 don’t really stay up with “current events” or “news,” but I’m finally getting around to checking out this Herman Cain character, and I’ve gotta tell you: Each and every one of his proposed policies is 100 percent sound. So it should come as no surprise that we’re jumping aboard the CAIN BUS!

When we realized we hadn’t yet gotten around to hosting an event at our office in Newport Beach, California, we seized the opportunity to host a party/fundraiser to spread the word. Tuesday evening, staff, clients, and friends both old and new joined us for our “160overNine-Nine-Ninety Whiplash Bash.” The punch was flowing, and so were the $$$s. Thanks for the contributions, and for helping us open up our new digs in style. And thanks to the locals for welcoming us and not busting up our boards. Next stop, White House!

Check out some of these hot pics:

Upstairs view of the office, located in the amazing Cannery Village of Newport Beach:

These garage doors really let in a lot of bugs. Who comes up with this stuff?

The piles of magazines prove that we’re for real:

Despite some of the world’s freshest seafood being literally steps from our door, we imported these oysters all the way from Nova Scotia! Take that, carbon footprint! And the flowers are edible (I had five, but they didn’t really taste like anything). Decadent!

Doubly decadent!:

Meanwhile, just down the street, Wednesday morning. If this beach was at the Jersey Shore, there’d be like a billion people on it: