Georgetown University, McDonough School of Business

As you'd expect from a top business school, they'd analyzed their own statistics and concluded that prospects attending information sessions tended to apply.

Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business offers a range of business and leadership degrees, and as they said during the competition we won, "If we can get the candidates to our information sessions, we can convince them to attend Georgetown."

So they asked us for an integrated marketing campaign to do just that. We devised the campaign, won the approval of deans and administrators, and created direct mail pieces, Internet banner ads, subway platform banners, and over 30 ad variations for newspapers, magazines, and even the Kennedy Center's Playbill.

The direct mail pieces were designed to engage a younger and business-savvy audience by using business-related puns. We featured recent graduates such as the manager at e-learning firm BlackBoard who was now "chalking up profits."

Our campaign did the trick; both attendance and applications rose markedly.