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 for Lakehead University, which managed to increase applications substantially.
The year before, the team that subsequently founded fisheye was hired to develop the creative concept behind this campaign for Lakehead University; at a time when the AoR for this account was the McLellan Group.The brief was very simple: Nobody knows we even exist. Get us some attention, we’ll figure out the details later.
The campaign was designed to make a splash. Everybody involved was surprised when the university had the guts to run with this:
The controversy created by the Yale Shmale campaign was quite astonishing.
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 the university received was worth about $1,000,000.00.