Personalized Marketing: To the Extreme!

So we hear "customized" and "personalized" a lot when it comes to marketing to prospective students, but one Pennsylvania U is taking it to the extreme.

As the AP reports, Wilkes University has been running ads that specifically feature prospective students' names, likes, hobbies, etc., in hopes of getting them to enroll. They put these ads on pizza boxes, billboards, gap pumps, movie theaters, in malls, and on cable channels like MTV. (AP photo by Matt Rourk of Briana Turnbaugh with her billboard). (This was all I could find of the creative, which I'm not too crazy about -- no way could you actually drive by and read that billboard! Look at all the words! It also doesn't look very interesting either with white and the text blocks have a blue background -- kind of cheap-looking ...)

The whole campaign is done for about $120,000. The University and its agency choose students from their applications, and the students sign consent forms to be featured in the ads.

Here are some examples of copy:

• "Lake Lehman senior Greg Heindel: "You give your time at the soup kitchen, the firehouse, and your church summer camp. Wilkes University would like to give you something — a top-quality education."
• "Scranton High senior Nicole Pollock: Our goal at Wilkes University is to be as much a mentor as your mother has been. (Now, if we could only make her ravioli.)"

They say that many students have become celebrities locally because of these ads. The agency and school also say in the article that these are meant to appeal directly to the "look at me" generation, aka the millennials who broadcast their lives via YouTube and Facebook.

Personally, I think this is a pretty cool and innovative strategy for a small school (Wilkes has 2,400 full-time undergrads), but I don't think it would work for us, a 20,000-plus student public institution.

That makes me wonder ... I distinctly remember last year during our high school focus groups driving past a billboard on the way into the small town. The board featured a local student who went to a competitor's university and said something like "Be like Brad Smith and go to XYZ State."

The students totally made fun of that billboard in the focus group.

But I think that is different than Wilkes's approach, as they are actually personalizing the messages in a cool way, whereas the board I saw last year was just kind of a "look how cool we are! we're trying to customize it to your town!" approach without much actual customization -- who can't slap a student name and face on a billboard? Students saw through that phony approach quickly.