Making the Grade

Don’t let the green hair and body piercing fool you.

Today’s college students aren’t simply scrounging pennies for pizza and beer. In fact, they’re spending more than $61 billion annually, according to Student Monitor, Ridgewood, NJ.

Gen X has been supplanted in the college ranks by Gen Y the largest generation since the Baby Boomers and marketers are lining up faster than pledges on Rush Night to reach them.

“We’ve seen clients boost their college marketing by 250 percent,” says Patrick West, director of event marketing at Youthstream Media Networks, New York City. “Earlier this year we pitched to an executive at Uncle Ben’s who said, ‘If you told me five years ago we’d be going for college kids at tailgate parties, I would have thrown you out of my office.’” Guess what Uncle Ben’s is doing these days?

“In many cases, college is the first opportunity [for kids] to make brand purchases on their own,” says Derek White, senior vp-youth marketing at 360 Youth, a division of college specialist MarketSource Corp., Cranbury, NJ.

Gen Y is incredibly media-savvy, but it’s also cynical of and fatigued by advertising. “These kids are desensitized to marketing because every time they turn around, they’re blitzed with another message,” says Samantha Noel, brand manager at Dr Pepper/Seven Up, Inc., Plano, TX.

They also like their entertainment, and their brands, a little edgier than previous generations. That has marketers devising ways to reach Gen Y that are somewhat more extreme than the methods used when they were in school. To wit:

• In a strategy that shows the demographic’s importance to brand success, Pepsi-Cola, Somers, NY, gave college students the first tastes of its new Mountain Dew Code Red last winter, long before it launched sampling programs for the general public in June. During the NCAA College Basketball Tournament in March, Pepsi hosted on-campus game-viewing parties at schools whose teams made the Sweet 16 round. Good Stuff, Stamford, CT, handled.

• Procter & Gamble, Cincinnati, last fall stationed “moms” in laundry facilities on and off-campus for a Wrinkle Free Laundry Week. The familial brand ambassadors offered cleaning tips and supplied quarters and samples of Downy fabric softener. Student Advantage, Boston, handled. P&G may repeat the effort this year.

• Bath & Body Works, New Albany, OH, last spring sent hunky “delivery men” in branded UPS-style trucks and uniforms to bring samples of its new Imagine Fine Fragrances to sorority houses on 20 East Coast campuses just before finals. Youthstream handled.

Delivery of nearly 100,000 samples generated “immediate buzz in those campus communities, and the line has done very well with the college audience,” says group product director Brian Talbot. “We did something new and unexpected, and it really energized our sales force.”

The trick in reaching Gen Y is to infiltrate their lifestyles without letting them know you’re infiltrating their lifestyles. HotJobs.com, New York City, hits campuses not as corporate suits, or even youthful-looking field reps, but with full-time students hired to serve as brand ambassadors. “Today’s students are tomorrow’s job seekers,” says vp-advertising Marc Karasu. “This is a great way to develop a relationship with them.”

Last year, HotJobs drew up a target list of 75 campuses, then hired 225 students to work with its local sales forces. The students distributed pamphlets in computer labs, sketched the brand’s logo on classroom chalkboards, and traversed the quadrangle wearing mortarboards and gowns to make HotJobs.com synonymous with graduation. The company plans to repeat the program during the 2001/2002 academic year. Student Advantage handles.

Be True to Their School

For those marketers a little skittish about donning kneepads and riding skateboards into town, the list of more traditional on-campus programs continues to grow.

AT&T Wireless, New York City, is a charter member of Campus Clout, a new service from MarketSource Corp. and Follett Higher Education Group, Oak Brook, IL, one of the leading operators of college bookstore.

The program lets marketers buy into six promotional periods surrounding major school events: freshman orientation, back-to-school, parents’ weekend, homecoming, spring break, and graduation. Tactics includes point-of-purchase displays, product signage, and purchase incentives through counter cards, handouts, and book bags, as well as online promotions through Follett’s efollett.com bookstore.

College Television Network (CTN), Atlanta, has steadily upped the stakes in the on-campus media world of school radio stations and newspapers. The network launched eight years ago as a “video jukebox,” but now sprinkles CNN Headline Updates, special segments produced by such partners as PC Magazine and Mademoiselle, and syndicated series including Politically Incorrect and Comedy Lab within its music programming. The network averages 7.2 million weekly viewers through TVs in dining halls and recreation areas such as gyms at more than 800 colleges. (The monitors are installed at no expense to the institutions.) Advertisers include Coca-Cola, Burger King, and Clairol, Inc., which pay between $500,000 and $1 million for sponsorships.

“These kids are inundated by TV, magazines, and the Internet. And they have only so much to spend each year,” says Joe Carillo, senior media planner at Stamford, CT-based Clairol, which this fall will use the network to launch a new hair-coloring product. “We need to show them we have products they want in the most direct way possible.”

The College Network has gotten even more direct by conducting events such as the Music Binge Tour (sponsored by Best Buy, Eden Prairie, MN) and travelling road shows for Politically Incorrect and Comedy Lab (sponsored by AT&T). Last spring, Nintendo, Redmond, WA, used CTN concerts to sample a mature-rated video game called Conquer.

Most colleges are extremely open to on-campus marketing, although many have guidelines prohibiting certain product categories such as alcohol, tobacco, or even credit cards. Since renting campus real estate provides a revenue stream, most institutions welcome marketers provided they don’t interfere with the academic process.

“We reserve the right to reject advertisers who are misleading or are considered objectionable by our student body,” says Terence Hsiao, director of business development at UCLA, Los Angeles. “We basically offer advertisers three venues: the student newspaper, live events, and an unlimited opportunity to hand out samples and information.”

“We could charge a marketer $35 to set up a table for half a day on campus, or $3,000 for a week in one of our ballrooms,” adds Rich Steele, director of the student center at Georgia Tech, Atlanta.

Boston University hosts its own annual freshman orientation program called Splash that invites brands to set up booths and distribute samples.

Follow the Fun

Don’t have the money or the inclination to visit multiple campuses? Then wait till the co-eds get together at Spring Break, “a concentration of students from all over the country in a specific geography,” says Tom Murray, director of marketing at The White Rain Co., Danbury, CT, manufacturer of hair care products such as Toni, The Dry Look, and Dippity-do Sport. “It’s a lot easier to reach them there.”

To reposition Dippity-do as a sporty gel for young, active males (the brand had been targeted to older women), White Rain ran a four-week sampling program in April in Panama City, FL. A team of eye-catching models wearing branded T-shirts and shorts mingled at bars, pools, and on the beach. “Rather than just hand out samples, men were actually getting their hair styled,” says Murray. “At one point, there wasn’t a man on the beach within a quarter mile who didn’t have gel in his hair.”

For years, Dr Pepper passed out 32-ounce cups filled with coupons as students registered for classes in the fall. Feeling that the tactic was too passive, the company “decided we needed something more experiential that involved students’ lifestyles,” says Noel.

So this year, Dr Pepper traveled to Panama City to host the Dr Pepper Cabana Café, which provided 300 beach chairs, live music, 10-foot submarine sandwiches (donated by local Publix grocery stores), free Internet access, and free phone calls to anywhere in the U.S. The College Kit, Lebanon, NH, handled.

“There were a lot of consumer marketers who set up booths in Panama City, but it looked like a trade show. Students just picked up their free samples and moved on,” says Noel. “We offered the only real place to hang out on Panama City Beach.” Dr Pepper estimates that 40 percent of the city’s 500,000 Spring Break attendees visited the Café. The brand also ran a recycling program that received positive media attention when Panama City mayor Gerry Clemmons declared a Dr Pepper Appreciation Day.

Call that extra credit.