National Ad Campaign Aims to Shift Narrative on Higher Ed

You won’t see students studying together in a library, images of grand campus buildings or crowded athletic events in a new campaign promoting higher education. There are no logos, no mascots and no official colors.

Instead, an elderly couple walk arm in arm smiling, with “Proud sponsor of a better life for everyone” printed across the image. Sparks fly from a welder’s electrode just behind the words “Proud sponsor of the future titans of industry.” Another image shows a masked nurse holding an infant with the words “Proud sponsor of goodbye nursing shortage.”

The ads are part of “College: Proud Sponsor of America at Its Best,” a national campaign that is explicitly not promoting a single institution. Its goal is to remind Americans of higher ed’s impact in bolstering national security, developing the economy and building the workforce.

“Higher ed may not be for everybody in terms of, ‘Hey, I want to go to college,’ but the benefits of higher ed are for everybody,” said Tamalyn Powell, a senior vice president of education at BVK, the marketing agency that created the campaign.

BVK officially launched Proud Sponsor last October after higher ed had spent months under attack from the Trump administration, but Powell said the agency didn’t create the public service campaign in reaction to the assault. Rather, it’s a response to years of public polling showing increasing skepticism about the value of higher ed.

Powell said she watched the poll numbers “with horror” and that now is the moment to “set the narrative for higher education rather than reacting to it, which is what we’ve been doing.”

The campaign is targeting adults ages 35 to 64. Data from BVK shows that perceptions of higher ed improved significantly after people viewed the campaign. The ads also positively influenced the opinions of people in groups who tend to be most skeptical or cynical about the value of higher education, such as conservatives or people in rural areas.

“That convinced me that this might have the ingredients for something that would have greater effect than anything I’ve been involved in in the past that related to the sector,” said Terry Flannery, the chief operations officer at the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, which is partnering with BVK on the campaign.

But it will take “significant resources” to get Proud Sponsor in front of its target audience, said Flannery. CASE is fundraising, but Flannery declined to offer more specifics about how much money they need. The organization is looking to individuals, corporations and foundations that believe in the value of higher ed to financially support the campaign, not colleges.

Flannery worries that if the funding comes from higher ed, the campaign could look self-interested and will be dismissed right away.

“We really need some third-party advocates,” she said.

Securing that financial support is crucial to the campaign and makes it different from similar efforts in the past that Flannery has been part of.

“Every other effort like this that I’ve been involved in—and there have been several over decades—never had money behind it,” she said.

Jamie Ceman, a senior executive vice president of reputation at RW Jones, agreed that while Proud Sponsor has some momentum, the funding piece is most important to the campaign’s eventual success.

“The funding piece is what always falls short,” she said of previous public service campaigns.

Another way campaigns can fall short of their goals is relying too heavily on institutions to push their message, Ceman added. Institutions typically target audiences already on their side.

“You can’t necessarily change negative perceptions by talking to the people who already love higher ed, and schools and colleges are equipped to market and communicate to their alumni, prospective students,” she said. “That’s where I think Proud Sponsor can be really powerful, because this is a larger advocacy campaign to reach people that campuses aren’t typically reaching.”

Building Support

Several national associations representing higher ed have publicly backed Proud Sponsor. The American Council on Education endorsed it a year ago, noting that it complements its own campaign, “Higher Ed Builds America.” More recently, the Council of Independent Colleges and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities signed on. This summer, the Inter-University Council of Ohio, representing the state’s 14 public institutions, is launching a statewide campaign as part of Proud Sponsor.

Nick Anderson, executive director of strategic communications at ACE, told Inside Higher Ed that ACE welcomes “any message that’s moving in the same direction.”

Anderson said in addition to the Proud Sponsor campaign, ACE’s “Higher Ed Builds America” offers a framework that institutions and state systems of higher ed can use to explain their impact at the regional, state and local level.

“There’s a need in this current moment to coalesce around the value of higher ed, however they want to say it,” he said.

But a new narrative won’t be enough to change the public perception, said Anderson.

“The messaging goes hand in hand with the hard work of innovation and improvement,” he said.

Still, the Proud Sponsor organizers hope colleges and universities will unify around the campaign, even as they acknowledge such collaboration can be contrary to institutions’ instincts.

“We keep hearing we need a united narrative,” Powell said, “and this is that narrative.”