Spartans Will….Be Featured in The New York Times
June 2, 2010 • 2:39 pm • POSTED BY Gina KentAs you may recall, we debuted components of the new brand and advertising campaign we created for Michigan State University during March Madness. And even though MSU was ousted by Butler in the Final Four, we’re still pretty proud of the Spartans, and our work. Something else to be proud of? Yesterday that work was featured in Stuart Elliott’s weekly “Campaign Spotlight” advertising column in The New York Times. Check it out here.
At the onset of our relationship, MSU, the nation’s eighth largest higher education campus community, had a national profile as a large, research-focused public university with a highly competitive athletics program, but suffered from limited public knowledge of their academic achievements and social impact. The school’s massive size had led to hundreds of communicators creating mixed messaging, inconsistent design, and a complete lack of a cohesive brand. Our job as an agency was to develop a brand that conveyed some of those great accomplishments taking place on campus, while still being flexible enough to be used by all those different communicators and designers within the University. Our solution? Take the University’s best known attribute and source of pride, the Spartans, and use it as an entry point into what the school is accomplishing off the courts and fields.
We show the Spartans as a collective community that bands together to create solutions to the world’s great problems, whether that’s helping battle malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa or teaching jazz to inner city youth in Detroit. All branding materials reflect MSU’s vast capabilities, broad knowledge, willingness to engage, and collaborative approach to create opportunity and help discover solutions for the world’s most challenging problems.
In addition to the television spot, we created print and online ads that drive viewers to a microsite (SpartanSagas.msu.edu) that features a teaser video for the “Spartan Sagas” campaign launching this summer. The site currently encourages MSU alumni to nominate themselves or others to share their stories of success based on their MSU education. Remarkable stories of achievement will be featured on the site as part of the second phase of the campaign this summer. You can find the rest of our MSU work here.
As the 8th largest higher education campus in the US, it is important for the public to see how MSU isn’t just about the outstanding athletics or partying which are mainly the only aspects that make the news. This campaign is a great way to create a MSU brand showing that Spartans make significant contributions to society and have a remarkable impact on problems all around the world.
I think this campaign is indeed a great way to unify the Spartan community. From experience, when I tell people I graduated from MSU the first thing they associate the university with is the basketball or football teams, or the cedar fest incident a few years ago. I think it is important for the public to look beyond the surface and see deeper into what MSU is all about, which is rooted in the education we receive from this outstanding university and how we use our MSU education beyond our 4 years in East Lansing and use that to benefit the world around us. This campaign does just that.