My dearest alma mater,

    
I graduated from our esteemed university in 2010 with an advertising degree and then trekked my way up to Washington, D.C. to dive head-first into the big world of advocacy advertising. I now spend my days working closely with clients from all over the country who have only one thing in common: They are trying to sell an idea.
    
So, I understand what it was that the higher-ups at UT were thinking with this “Big Orange, Big Ideas” mess that has popped up in my inbox and all over my various news feeds and invariably pissed a lot of people off. It makes perfect sense for a university trying to break into the top 25 to have a specific branding message. It makes perfect sense to unify color schemes and fonts and talk about which buzz words are the most effective in making the university more attractive. It makes perfect sense to have all of those things consolidated into one document that is available for download by anyone at the university who might be designing promotional material or who might be curious about what the official orange of UT is (as a side note, PMS 151, CMYK 0/50/100/0 and HEX F77F00 are three COMPLETELY different colors).
    
But that’s where they lose me.
   
 Looking at the execution of this whole thing (from my purely digital vantage point), I’m not quite sure what the administration is trying to accomplish. Is the university rebranding itself, or advertising the new brand book? Every other branding campaign I’ve ever seen uses the branding ideas to form messages that are then sent to the target audience. Their brand books are internal documents used to shape the final message. It’s almost like UT is trying to outsource that final step, but instead, they have made it seem like they are trying to tightly control the information about the school. “Stop talking about the big orange screw and use these buzz words instead!” says the Big Orange Propaganda Machine. The “vibrant,” “dynamic,” “investigative” student body sees this “branding campaign” plastered on the side of the library and feels like UT is blatantly and obviously trying to manipulate them.
    
And let’s talk about this $85,000 price tag. In both the consulting world and the academic world, that much money is simply a drop in the bucket. I could talk about the fact that, to a recent graduate who is unemployed and unsure about the future (not to mention has also been getting donation e-mails from the alumni office since about five minutes before the graduation ceremony), that is a life changing amount of money, but instead I want to point out something else entirely:
    
UT has a world-class advertising faculty and curriculum. Guess what the capstone class of this curriculum does? It designs a branding campaign from start to finish. Actually, let me rephrase: It designs GOOD branding campaigns from start to finish. When my class got done presenting to the CEO and CMO of McCormick & Co (the Fortune 500 spice company) two years ago, they remarked that our finished product was better than the campaign they’d just paid millions for. The university could have easily had seniors paying to design this campaign for the school. A home-grown branding campaign that the university and the student body could feel proud of. Instead, they paid a consulting firm $75,000 for … what, exactly?
    
UT students appear to feel as if this campaign is a slap in the face of their independent thinking. As an alumni, it’s a slap in the face to both my degree program and my donated dollars. Which is kind of heartbreaking, if you really think about it.


Laura Brown
B.S Advertising
University of Tennessee class of 2010