Carleton hires a new agency to go all Mad Men on us and whip up a new recruitment campaign. A look at the process.
By Fateema Sayani
What is CU? The Ontario Universities Fair (OUF), the circus of university recruitment, is held annually in Toronto. It is where great institutions of knowledge use swag, gimmicks and an undercurrent of optimism to compete for kids, but Carleton's coolness is unbranded. It needs a hook. What to say?
The Big Guns: CU's first recruit is Toronto ad man Zak Mroueh, the former majordomo at mega-agency TAXI. He tuned up Mini Cooper, Nike and Pfizer with his clever campaigns. Call him crazy: at the prime of his career, and with a pile of awards to his name, he left to start his own agency, the avant-garde Zulu Alpha Kilo (Zak, geddit?).
The Research: A team of 10 at Zulu Alpha Kilo studies CU's novel education programs (the Batawa initiative to re-launch a town, the Rwanda Initiative to re-build that country's media sector), meets with staff and students and looks at other campaigns the world over. "It was a sea of sameness," says ZAK's co-creative director Joseph Bonnici. When talking about Carleton, "entrepreneurial, forward-thinking, community-minded and energetic" are words that come to mind, he says.
The Process: The creative team gathers in the company's war room for intensive, 20-minute, stopwatch-timed think sessions, filling the room with pages and pages of ideas. "Someone says something, and it goes around the room and builds," Bonnici says. "By the time you finish, the idea is fully developed."
The Result: A 12-week campaign aimed at the 613/905 markets is launched at OUF. Outside of the fair, students happen upon a wind booth where they attempt to pick the winning ticket that will take them to Ottawa to see the great grounds of CU. The tagline, Anything but Textbook, is unveiled. Riffing on this theme, designers and writers create radio spots, social media ploys, viral video, print media teaser ads and 3-D guerrilla stunts.
But Wait: We have a textbook in our logo! Does this slogan knock textbooks? It's a sentence fragment! "It's not as literal," Bonnici says. "For us, Anything but Textbook, is about doing things directly."
