Reaching a Well-Qualified National Audience

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Nearly 700,000 copies of the 2003 U.S. News & World Report guide to America's Best Colleges were purchased at bookstores and newsstands, making it the most popular college guidebook sold in America. With all of the ranking information from the magazine's annual college issue, along with a host of features about selecting colleges and paying for a college education, the guide is a bible for many prospective students and their parents.

With the 2004 guide, which was released in late August, U.S. News offered colleges and universities the chance to participate in an eight-page special advertising section. WPI chose to be one of only a handful of institutions represented in this section. The university's one-page advertisement was designed with several key objectives in mind:

It had to "stand out from the crowd," meaning the design had to quite different from typical college and university advertisements.
It had to immediately convey a sense of WPI as a high-quality institution.
It needed to anticipate an interest of students who might be interested in a university like WPI, and provide information that would intrigue them and motivate them to want to know more by visiting the WPI Web site.
Recognizing that most readers of the guidebook would have little or no knowledge of WPI, the ad needed to portray WPI as school worthy of further discovery.

The message of quality was embodied in the design of the ad, which presented a brief message using elegant typography and simple red and black borders, with the appearance of the raised ink surface typical of fine letterpress printing. This design is radically different from that of any other ad in the guidebook, giving the WPI message high visibility.

The brief copy in the ad focused on the many well-known corporations that consider WPI a key recruiting school (and the excellent universities that accept our students for graduate study). This message zeroed in on one of the key outcomes of WPI's unique approach to technological education-the success of our graduates--one that our own research suggests is among the most important factors prospective students and their parents look for as they search for colleges.

Finally, the ad's headline, "Congratulations, You've Made Your First Discovery," acknowledged that readers would likely be discovering WPI for the first time, but also had two more subtle messages. First, it said that WPI recognizes that students who are well suited to its educational program tend to be inquisitive and interested in making new discoveries about the world. Second, it suggested that WPI is the kind of place where students can indulge their curious nature and make some more big discoveries.

The ad leads readers to a unique landing page on the Web, www.wpi.edu/Admin/UR/Marketing/USNews/, which ties into the "discovery" theme and presents a number of key messages about WPI that, in turn, link visitors to the new undergraduate admissions Web site.

The guidebook ad is WPI's second foray into advertising to U.S. News' readers. Last year, the university told its story in a three-page advertorial that ran in more than 50,000 copies of the U.S. News annual "Best Colleges" issue in the greater Boston market.

Download the ad (254 K PDF)

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Last modified: Mar 22, 2005, 15:55 EST