Watch the TV advertisement that will appear during commercial breaks on "Meet the Press," "Face the Nation," "The Colbert Report" and "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart."
Correction appended
Updated 10/24/11
AU will be expanding its WONK marketing campaign with a TV advertisement and more ads in Metro stations and bus stops this fall.
The 30-second TV spot premiered Oct. 16 during the commercial breaks of “Meet the Press” on NBC, “Face the Nation” on CBS, and during “The Colbert Report” and “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” on Comedy Central, according to assistant vice president of marketing Deborah Wiltrout. Wiltrout served as producer and assistant director for the TV commercial.
The TV commercial
The TV commercial shows WONK print ads “coming to life” in various spots around D.C., such as Metro bus stops, in magazines and on the side of moving trucks. A voice-over explains how AU is a center for learning and innovation.
“Something remarkable is happening at AU!” the narrator says.
WONK print ads featured in the commercial include Opera Wonk, Academic Wonk and Political Wonk.
The commercial will run through Nov. 6 on these TV stations.
“It’s a limited run, but it’s targeted at the programs we think people interested in AU would watch,” Wiltrout said.
The commercial will also be shown on the TV screens around campus and promoted through AU’s social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter.
The commercial will also run during two nationally televised AU men’s basketball games on the CBS Sports Network in February.
While the spot normally costs “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Vice President of Communications Terry Flannery said AU was able to get the two TV spots for free because CBS gives each participating school in the basketball game one free TV ad spot per game.
An “overwhelming amount” of participants in the commercial are AU students, staff and alumni, Flannery said.
Staff and students in the School of Communications and the College of Arts and Sciences served as the actors, producers, camera operators and sound mixers for the TV commercial project.
Using “in-house talent” cut down costs for the commercial significantly, Flannery said.
“Most universities don’t have this kind of internal capacity, so they would have to spend two to three times the resources we did for an outside firm to produce a video of similar quality and production values,” she said.
Flannery also said this commercial will help “reinforce the AU brand” and show how AU is a growing college.
“AU is a place for active citizenship, powerful leaders and a center for learning,” Flannery said.
Director of University Video Matt Fredricks said this TV ad is different from other college TV commercials because it shows how AU interacts with the D.C. community.
“Most college ads just show the campus,” he said. “But this ad shows how we bring AU to the world. It shows the city and shows what the AU experience is like.”
Metro ads
AU is also expanding its outreach through more print ads in Metro stations and at Metro bus stops.
The University has “station domination” at Federal Triangle this October, meaning every space for print ads in the station is filled with an AU WONK ad, according to Wiltrout.
AU chose to buy out the advertisements for this station because Federal Triangle is an area with many federal workers who might be considering a master’s degree as the next step in their career, Wiltrout said.
AU also has a print ad presence at:
• Farragut West
• Foggy Bottom
• Eastern Market
• Judiciary Square
• McPherson Square
• Tenleytown
AU’s digital bus shelter ads will run from October to November at over 30 bus shelters across the city.
These print ads, the same WONK ads already used in magazines and newspapers in the D.C. area, will appear on bus shelters’ digital ad space on a rotating schedule, once every 12 seconds per minute.
Advertising costs
The WONK marketing campaign is one of three communication initiatives that fall under the “Win Recognition and Distinction” category of AU’s annual Strategic Plan for 2012. The other two initiatives are “increasing our digital media presence” and “offer our Web content through mobile access.”
The combined total budget for all three of these initiatives for the 2012 fiscal year is $1 million, according to Flannery.
AU’s WONK “media buy” — which includes the cost of placing ads on the specific TV shows, the ads in the Metro stations, online ads and transit shelter ads — is funded by a part of this $1 million budget.
The University budgeted $35,000 for the production of the TV ad in their Strategic Plan. This only includes the cost of creating the video, not the cost of purchasing ad space on the TV networks.
“Since the campaign is developed internally by our own AU team, we’re not paying an outside firm for production, so the funds can be focused on getting the messages out to new audiences that we’ve never reached and changing the minds of those who have a dated impression of AU,” Flannery said.
She said she hopes these TV commercials and print ads will reach a wide range of people and will showcase AU’s attributes.
“The audience for this campaign is very broad,” she said. “We’re reaching out not only to prospective students but also prospective donors, researchers, higher education officials, parents of prospective students and many more. This is an all-encompassing campaign.”
jryan@theeagleonline.com
A previous version of this article stated that Terry Flannery's title was executive director of University Communications and Marketing; but she is vice president of communication.
