State-wide Advertising Campaign Reaches Out to New Audience

It takes a combination of media to reach busy, working adults.  And if you’re trying to encourage them to reach a goal many of them have given up on, you need to find a way to talk to your audience so that you motivate them and give them hope.

At DeLaune and Associates, we’ve just finished a new state-wide campaign to encourage adults to go back and complete their college degrees.  It’s part of an effort by The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) to motivate the estimated 3.7  million Texas adults with some college—and no degree—to finish what they’ve started.

Trying to get people to go back to school—even though they know it can help their careers—is a little like trying to get people to eat more vegetables:  everyone agrees that it’s a good idea, but it may not sound like that much fun.

We partnered with Austin’s Elephant Productions to produce a campaign that included:

• TV SPOTS
• RADIO
• PANDORA
• FACEBOOK ADS
• DIRECT MAIL
• WORKSITE MATERIALS
• WEB BANNERS
• PRINT ADS.

It’s a bilingual campaign and it promotes The Texas Affordable Bachelor’s Degree—a low-cost, high quality degree that can be completed largely online.  The degree builds on prior work experience, military service, and life skills to help people move quickly through the curriculum.  By combining both traditional media (like TV PSAs) and newer media (like Facebook and Pandora), our goal is to give more people easy-access to the information.  We want to reach as many people as we can with information about this new degree, designed specifically to give people the skills that employers say they need for a 21^st century workforce.

And if our efforts help some percentage of that 3.7 million Texans realize more of their potential—for their own satisfaction and for the good of their families—we’ll be proud to have made a small contribution to the goal of making more Texans work-ready for a growing Texas economy.

by Sara Rider