“You can’t get everybody to your campus. So we thought, ‘Well, why don’t we bring RIT to Boston?’” said Trierweiler.
RIT shelled out a six-figure sum for its marketing campaign in Boston, which began in Downtown Crossing and Government Center last year and expanded to North and South stations in March.
It’s an uncommon example of an out-of-state school paying big bucks for MBTA ad space. After all, a good chunk of the audience in a T station is, inevitably, students already enrolled at one of the many colleges and universities serviced by the transit system — including schools with a similar focus, like Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Wentworth Institute of Technology.
But Trierweiler sees these station takeovers as playing the long game. The idea, he said, is to boost brand awareness among high school students and their families passing through the high-traffic hubs — or perhaps undergraduate students considering their postgrad options. The school also hopes the campaign makes an impression on area business leaders who may see an RIT student’s resume cross their desk.
“It’s not a small sum of money,” he said, declining to disclose the specific cost of the Boston campaign, “but we think it’s a good investment to show the value of what we provide to those different audiences.”
So far, he said, it appears that investment is paying off. The school has seen about a 40 percent increase in traffic to RIT’s website from users in the Boston area over the past year, according to Trierweiler, and there’s also been an uptick in applications and deposits. (Last fall, there were more than 700 students from Massachusetts enrolled at the school’s main campus, the fourth-highest feeder state.)
“Boston really embraces what RIT believes in, which is the intersection of technology, the arts, and design,” he said. “It’s a leader in science and research, [a] thriving higher education scene. So in that sense, it’s an attractive market for us to be in to tell our story.”
And tell that story they do. The campaign enlisted RIT students to show off the eclectic interests they’ve cultivated at the school alongside their academics. Take, for instance, the business student who played on the hockey team, or the trombonist studying computer science. And who could forget the international and global studies major who was also part of the school’s beekeeping club (yes, beekeeping).
“The idea is to show that you can be the different facets of yourself here at RIT,” Trierweiler said.
Once RIT did the student photoshoot, they sent off the results — plus some brand assets and ad copy — to Outfront Media, which handles advertising for the MBTA. The agency then “did the heavy lift of design for these stations,” said Joseph Bellavia, RIT’s executive creative director. Outfront also coordinated transit campaigns for the school in New York City — its first venture into transit advertising — and Washington, D.C.
Outfront Media is well versed in the art of “station dominations” — campaigns that, through sheer saturation, aim to break through to commuters more likely looking at their phones than station signage. RIT’s setups at North and South stations qualify; the displays at Downtown Crossing and Government Center started out that way, but have since been scaled back. Over the years, this strategy has been favored by brands such as Boston Medical Center, Dunkin’, and L.L.Bean.
In Boston, it’s unusual, but not unheard of, for an out-of-state school to buy up transit ad space, which was projected to generate about $18 million in revenue in the T’s current annual budget. Other such clients have included Keene State College in New Hampshire and the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, according to Outfront.
“That said, most of our education clients are based in Massachusetts,” said Victoria Mottesheard, Outfront’s vice president of marketing for the east region, in a statement.
Though RIT’s current Boston campaign is slated to end later this month, shortly after the school’s commencement celebrations, you haven’t seen the last of RIT’s “tiger pride.” RIT’s chief communications officer, Bob Finnerty, said the school plans to bring ads to Boston again in the upcoming academic year.
Dana Gerber can be reached at dana.gerber@globe.com. Follow her @danagerber6.
