On the television show "Arrested Development," Tobias F+â-+nke often makes comments that -¡-¡- when taken out of context - sound incredibly homosexual, even though they aren't supposed to be. Not that there's anything wrong with that. However, his brother-in-law Michael Bluth still tries to help him realize his verbal faux pas by pointing them out and saying, "There's got to be a better way to say that."
The same needs to be said for Ball State University's current marketing campaign. The billboards state that, "Ball State is cutting-edge cool," in an attempt to capitalize on being named Intel Corp.'s "Most Unwired University" earlier this school year.
But Ball State, there has got to be better way to promote our university.
"Cutting-edge cool" is a phrase that sounds like it belongs burning in 1980s Hell along with "rad," "totally tubular" and "Where's the beef?"
Advertising a school on something as arbitrary as a national wireless rating doesn't really promote anything useful quite yet - especially since wireless technology is pretty much only used by students as a high-tech distraction during class.
Maybe a better slogan would be, "Ball State: where you don't have to quit your Yahoo! Literati just because class is starting."
But seriously, there has got to be a better slogan out there to advertise a college that I'm proud of - most of the time - and hopefully everyone else is, too.
One of the first suggestions that comes to mind is to promote the sports scene in Cardinal land, since athletics usually help lure even non-athletes to various schools. I was thinking of something like, "Ball State football promises to be .500 next year. No, really, quit laughing."
Actually, I've been meaning to give kudos to our football team, which won four more games than I thought it would this season. Here's to an above-average season next year. Hope the stadium additions are worth it.
Or, how about a slogan that states how we are planning to beautify the campus. Sexy campuses attract students, so how about something like, "We have a nice two-tenths of a mile strip on McKinley Avenue, and everything after that is bumpy, pot hole Hell - but we're working on it."
Anyway, to actually be serious for a change - seriously - there are many aspects of the university we can highlight in an ad campaign that doesn't deal with connecting to things without wires.
The Princeton Review named Ball State a "Best in the Midwest" university for 2006, one of many schools to receive that award. See? Princeton: That usually means smart, so why isn't that on a billboard somewhere?
Also, the landscape architecture department was ranked as one of the nation's top 10 programs in the 2005 "Almanac of Architecture and Design." Why isn't that blown up and advertised?
Even U.S. News & World Report recognized Ball State as having one of the best undergraduate business programs in the nation, according to the new 2006 rankings - but I'm still looking for that as I drive along I-69.
All of this information can be found on Ball State's "Rankings and Recognitions" Web page, along with dozens of awards Ball State has won. So although wireless is great and offers a plethora of capabilities, until something ground-breaking is being done with that technology, please advertise the plethora of other reasons this is a great university to attend.
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