WMU ‘Smart Ride’ campaign kicks off

Josh Kalil

Western Herald

Chyn Wey Lee/Western Herald WMU's billboard located on US 131 between West Main and Stadium Drive.

“Smart Ride,” the new advertisement campaign for Western Michigan University, was chosen to follow the now old “Saddle up Enroll” slogan that became synonymous with WMU over the last couple years.

The third year of the new WMU advertising campaign includes 46 billboards going up through-out Michigan, featuring the names, high schools, grade point average and program of study of 13 freshmen students.

The campaign spreads the billboards across Michigan with 28 in Southeast Michigan, seven in Lansing, three in the Kalamazoo area and eight in Grand Rapids.

“When we did the boards we target a student in the area where that student comes from,” said Greg Rosine, senior vice president for Advancement and Legislative Affairs.  

The idea is to localize WMU to different areas of the state. 

“How do you make billboards personal? Let’s keep it local,” Rosine said. “[Drivers] will know the high schools. The high schools are there and local. You know somebody who has gone there or transferred there. So you know it’s real.”

The billboards, off highways like I-94 and I-96, are meant to show WMU in a different light, away from the “Wastern” party school stereotype. 

“You see a student on the billboard and you can’t get a lot of message across with people traveling at 70 mph,” Rosine said. “You have  two or three seconds to really get the message across and the message is [that] there are very bright students that come to WMU.

“People don’t get a high GPA from sitting around on their hands, they get a high GPA because they earned it,” he said.

The new campaign also aims to show that WMU isn’t a second-class school.  

“We can stand in the same league as the [University of Michigan] and Michigan State [University]. We’re there,” Rosine said. “She [Lauren from the Royal Oak billboard] had a 3.952 GPA, where could she of gone? She could go anywhere. Where’d she go? She came to Western.”

Royal Oak High School has turned into a big success, according to Rosine. The principal of the school asked for poster sized printouts of the billboard to hang inside the school. The school also wants a picture of the billboard to put on their webpage.

Rachel Rosenbach, an English education major, went to Dondero High School, one of the two schools that combined to form Royal Oak High School in 2006.

“I like them, obviously I’m proud as a student at Western,” said Rosenbach, an English educa-tion major. “Especially [since the billboards are] in areas that aren’t close to [Kalamazoo], but statewide.”

“It keeps it familiar, knowing that they are attending that university,” Rosenbach said. “It makes it a homier place.”

So far, the only negative feedback Rosine has received has been from parents when the bill-boards weren’t up as soon as expected.

Two focus groups were held to get student reaction before the billboards went up, Rosine said. The groups were used to make sure the billboards’ message was conveyed as it was intended. 

“For a long time we hadn’t been blowing our horn.  [It’s] not necessarily about the institution, it’s about the people that make the choice to come here.”

Cheryl Roland, executive director of university relations, has been a part of the campaigns over the last three years. 

“We work with the creative firm [the Image Group] of Holland, Michigan,” Roland said.

The firm helps WMU in purchasing the space to put up the advertisements. The 46 billboards, which will be displayed from October to December, will cost around $150,000, Roland said, a cost similar to the previous campaign.

“We had expected going into the fall that’s what the cost would be,” Roland said. “[It is] similar to the earlier campaigns.”

The billboards are meant to help change the image of WMU and help the university keep enrollment steady in the tough economic times. 

“Fall enrollment numbers are down, not quite one percent,” Roland said. “It’s a very slight decline, something we predicted.”

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Posted by heraldstaff on Nov 12 2009. Filed under Campus, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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