Glennis Nagel
co-editor
“This is Nebraska-Kearney…Scholarship. Achievement. Community.” is the theme of a television spot marketing campaign to recruit students.
“UNK is currently running a television spot campaign as a part of its marketing strategy,” said Curt Carlson, UNK vice chancellor for University Relations. “This is the most ambitious broadcast campaign in UNK history, according to long-time UNK observers, reflecting the need to expose the University’s name to ever more people, and to tell its distinctive story ever more effectively.”
The spot is being aired on multiple broadcast and cable systems across the state—from Omaha and Lincoln in the East, all along the I-80 corridor, to Scottsbluff in the panhandle. Several dozen small rural cable systems within Nebraska and across state lines in Wyoming and Colorado are also carrying the UNK message.
In addition, the spot has been aired on multiple broadcast venues related to recent UNK sporting events, including a nationally distributed NCAA “broadband” streamed Web cast and as part of NET’s statewide coverage of the UNK wrestling tournament.
According to Carlson, a second part of the television campaign is a “branding” campaign that displays UNK’s logo and campus images at the top and bottom of the hour as a component of the station’s ID’s. The “ID” campaign is airing in Lincoln and Omaha. UNK’s messages, in both the spot campaign and the ID campaign, appear in programming selected for exposure to two demographic groups crucial to UNK—prospective students and parents of prospective students.
The TV campaign is built around the “Scholarship, Achievement and Community” theme that was central to last fall’s city newspaper, high school newspaper and outdoor advertising campaign. At one time during that campaign, a UNK billboard prominently situated along a major Interstate highway in Omaha was pictured on the front page of the Omaha World-Herald, illustrating reporter Matthew Hansen’s story about marketing efforts by all the campuses of the University of Nebraska.
UNK’s Marketing Advisory Council (MAC) is providing counsel and ideas to University Relations, the office responsible for designing and implementing this campaign. The campaign will run for the next several weeks, a period when many high school seniors are weighing their options about where to attend college.
The television spot and the UNK station ID may be viewed online at: http://www.unk.edu/tvspots.
