Univ. of Illinois Dir of Advertising & Digital Media Michelle Stenger (@IlliniAthletics) has been at the school for two years. Prior to arriving at UI, the Cincinnati native worked in ticket sales for the Bengals and was the Univ. of Cincinnati’s Assistant Dir of Marketing. Working in the college space requires being ready for the ebb and flow of the year, especially the times when athletics are not as active as usual. Stenger said of planning, “People use tent pole events; having those on the calendar and being able to plan around that and really stockpile stuff that we can put out when it’s getting slow, evergreen kind of content. We’ve had some things with Dick Butkus for a couple of months and are just waiting for the right time to use it so it can make the most impact.”
Evolution of social and digital media in college space:
Especially in the college space you are thinking of recruits who want to come to the University of Illinois without saying, “come here,” because we don’t want NCAA violations. Platforms like Snapchat and the demographics that are on there, has come up in recent years and really important to the college space. Social in general gets the word out more than before. We’re not using newspapers like we used to and radio like we used to. We still use them a little bit, but since I’ve been here, we used to spend $500,000 on trade and we’ve cut that down almost 50%. Now we’re at the point where all of our trade is in any local advertising that we’ll do. We’re spending cash buys on digital advertising where it’s about a 60-40 split, digital to traditional.
Using social and digital media to recruit staff and non-student-athletes:
When you look at sports in general, and teams in the NBA versus maybe in the NFL, there’s definitely a difference in what you see on social and digital of what teams are able to do and what people in these positions have the creative freedom to do. Even when I was looking at this position, one of my mentors mentioned to me to look at the university’s (social) account, not athletic department's account.
Challenges in standing out in a crowded marketplace:
We’re the only game in town in Champaign-Urbana. Now when you go out to St. Louis and Chicago, that’s where it gets a little more difficult. We try to target passionate fans in Chicago, St. Louis and other areas in the Midwest that are within driving distance. What we try to do is make it as easy as we can for them to come out to the games.
Aside from funding, how colleges differ from pros digitally:
Some of the difference lies in our student-athletes. When we work with our sponsorship team, Learfield goes out and sells our rights. But if we put a Papa John’s logo on a victory graphic, we can’t have a student-athlete on it.
Brands and schools that inspire socially:
Clemson in the past couple years, and it doesn’t hurt to win a national championship. They do a great job. Oregon with that Nike connection and all of the uniform stuff they do. We look a lot at what they do. We can’t get to that same scope, and it’s interesting to see how they present that. Uniform stuff is something that people eat up.
Staying nimble as college seasons end and content needs to increase:
What we try to do, especially in the past year, is stay ahead of what we know is going to come. We know the end of the season is coming, we know we’ll have all of these tournaments going on. Our men’s golf team is dominant and has won the Big Ten eight of the last nine years and three in a row. Stuff like that we know is going to come up, so we have content ready. They took over our Snapchat during the Big Ten tournament for some cool content that we don’t market specifically. We know football season is coming up, we knew the NFL Draft was coming up.
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