The fisheye team worked on several campaigns for Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, high up in Northern Ontario. The first brief was very simple: Nobody knows we even exist. Get us some attention, we’ll figure out the details later.
We presented a campaign that was designed to make a splash. We would be lying if we didn’t say that we were surprised when the university had the guts to run with this:
The controversy created by the Yale Shmale campaign was quite astonishing and went way beyond anything we had expected to happen.
The CBC featured it on the news, every hour for two days, amused journalists asked the White House to comment (they refused), Yale University turned out not to be amused (noises were made about getting legal involved), even the BBC in the UK did run a feature about a small, plucky university from the middle of nowhere. People either loved it, or hated it in equal measure.
When the storm finally subsided, student applications for the year turned out to have spiked by 17%.
The unpaid media support we received was worth about $1,000,000.00.
For next year’s campaign, the client’s appetite for adventure had been somewhat sated. Instead of feeding the flames, we decided to use the essence of the Yale Shmale campaign, think for yourself, as a campaign platform.
Live Nation’s CEO Michael Rapino and Shy-Ann Hovorka, both Lakehead University alumni, were two of the faces we featured in this recruitment campaign, which, albeit quieter, still managed to increase applications and win a handful of awards.
