From the Nominator

With no budget for new commercial production, Northwestern’s Office of Global Marketing and Communication continues to find scrappy ways to produce compelling TV spots in-house by using Northwestern Magazine stories as a springboard. In the winter 2023 issue of Northwestern Magazine, we produced a roundup of popular Northwestern alumni and faculty atop the field of sports journalism. We developed the story knowing we could make it work beyond a print feature alone, so we crafted a commercial from the same original material. We added motion graphics and animation to the print illustrations and photography. This concept fit perfectly with our current commercial campaign, which asks provocative questions to promote the universe of people and activities at Northwestern. This campaign airs locally and sometimes nationally on several networks during televised university athletic events and also runs on in-stadium and in-arena jumbotrons at Northwestern’s home games. The sports journalism content of our “Purple Press” commercial is targeted perfectly to a sports-enthusiast audience, which includes a great number of our alumni fan base. Our campaign’s secondary objective is to publicize Northwestern Magazine as an important digital property and point of connection with the Northwestern community and the broader public. URLs at the end of each spot drive viewers to the appropriate story pages in Northwestern Magazine. We saw a substantial increase in traffic to our “Purple Press” feature story as a result of the campaign.

From the Judges

Creative use of alumni to promote a specific program at the university. Using photos instead of video made the spot efficient. Motion graphics and sound make this a nice spot.