It’s no secret that Ivy League athletes perform well in the classroom. What’s not as well-known is how they perform on the field.
That’s the inspiration behind the Ivy League’s new brand campaign called “An Unrivaled Experience,” which launches this week across all eight of the Ivy campuses. The initiative features a 30-second PSA that will run during Ivy League broadcasts and an alternative Ivy League logo for use on uniforms, playing surfaces and other branding platforms. The alternate logo is the first brand adjustment the Ivy has made in more than a decade.
Some of the reasoning behind the Ivy League’s new alternative logo.
The 65-year-old conference worked with Teamup, a London-based brand consulting agency, on the campaign. They’ll begin unveiling the new mark this week on social media and other digital platforms.
“What is not as well understood is how successful our athletes are,” said Robin Harris, who just celebrated her 10th anniversay as the Ivy League’s executive director. “That’s what we’re trying to share through this campaign.”
In her discussions with athletic directors in the Ivy League, Harris acknowledged the need to communicate the athletic successes more effectively. For instance, she said, few people realize that the Ivy League finished sixth in the 2018-19 Learfield Directors’ Cup out of 32 Division I conferences for overall success. That made the Ivy League the highest-ranked conference outside of the power five.
In Harris’ annual year-end reports, she’s accustomed to emphasizing graduation rates and Annual Progress Reports for the conference’s eight members. Good grades and competitive success don’t have to be mutually exclusive, Harris said.
The rebranding is designed to put more focus on Ivy League athletic achievement like Yianni Diakomihalis of Cornell winning two straight NCAA wrestling titles. getty images
“We are demonstrating to the rest of Division I that it is possible to approach athletics in a balanced way to allow student athletes to truly be students academically, socially and culturally,” said Harris, who added that the league’s multimedia rights holder, JMI Sports, contributed as well.
From a public relations standpoint, though, much of the Ivy League’s success has come in women’s hockey, lacrosse, field hockey and fencing — sports that don’t attract a lot of media attention but require substantial time demands for its athletes.
Capturing the unique balance student athletes maintain at an Ivy League school was the challenge. Harris met with a handful of agencies about a brand campaign and was taken by Fred Popp’s presentation for Teamup.
“Fred captured our unique attributes succinctly and powerfully, in a way I had not seen from anyone else,” Harris said. “The work they’ve done has resonated with every group.”
Teamup also embarked on an exhaustive survey of more than 1,000 Ivy League student athletes to explore the conference’s core attributes.
“Honing in on what makes the Ivy League special and the words ‘Unrivaled Experience’ came about after the surveys and focus groups,” Harris said.
The surveys revealed another compelling figure — 60% of the athletes are involved in the campus community through some sort of non-sports activity. That led to a tentacle of the main campaign called “The Power of And,” a platform to highlight what the student athletes are doing to immerse themselves in college life.
