When Eva Ng received acceptance letters from UCLA and UC Berkeley, she was faced with a difficult decision.
Her solution, which was to go online and research each school in detail, is not unusual among today’s high school seniors. Yet universities such as UCLA have only recently considered the Internet in their advertising pitches.
“During junior year, a whole bunch of colleges sent me a lot of stuff,” Ng said. “UCLA was always one of my top choices, and I visited their Web site a lot.”
Ng is one of thousands of high school students that University Communications reaches out to every year as part of UCLA’s ongoing advertising campaign.
This year, the campaign has moved largely online, introducing new content that cannot be included in brochures, said Lawrence Lokman, the assistant vice chancellor of communications.
About a month ago, University Communications launched “Here. Now. UCLA,” a campaign featuring some of the university’s most prominent faculty and students talking about their experiences in 30-second commercials, Lokman said.
“Here. Now. UCLA” commercials have been posted online through the admissions office and are linked to YouTube and Facebook, he added.
These commercials comprise some of the 567 videos UCLA has released through YouTube in the past year. The most popular video, “Prom Dress Rugby, UCLA,” has received just more than 238,000 views. Other videos feature hour-long lectures from distinguished professors and guest speakers, including Howard Schultz, founder and CEO of Starbucks.
Lokman said the Internet has allowed the university to expand its advertising beyond the limits of standard brochures.
“The Internet provides opportunities to post interesting content in engaging ways, where you can reach people for free and are not bound by the borders of traditional formats,” he said. “It’s both a marketing and a learning experience.”
Advertisements primarily target prospective students and alumni, the latter of which the university depends on for donations, Lokman said.
“Particularly in the face of budget cuts, we rely on expanding our philanthropic support, and it’s important that we reach out to as many people as we can,” he said.
UCLA has worked to expand its advertising campaign to other media forms as well, Lokman said.
With a $500,000 grant from the UCLA Foundation, the university aired commercials on ESPN during the NCAA Tournament in March, he said.
One of these commercials featured basketball legend and UCLA alumnus Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who talked about a professor who inspired him when he was an undergraduate history student.
The commercials aired in Los Angeles and Washington D.C. and reached a total population of 6.5 million people, Lokman said.
“Ads help to communicate aspects of the campus that are not so well-known,” he said. “They bolster our reputation and increase the extent to which people connect to what goes on at UCLA.”
Tarig Chang, a first-year electrical engineering student, said he believes increased advertising is a good idea.
“I think having a variety of advertising is a great way to attract more people,” Chang said. “And more online content seems like it would use less money while still putting UCLA on the map.”
Ng said she was pleased with the wide amount of information about UCLA she found online, although she said advertisements tended to focus more on academics than on social life.
For Ng, the dilemma over which school to attend ultimately came down to her experiences visiting the UCLA and UC Berkeley campuses.
“You can’t really feel how nice the weather is from paper printouts and the computer screen,” she said. “But when I visited UCLA, I totally felt at home, and I could imagine myself living there for four years.”