Working for World Campus, the Online Education department of Penn State, we were asked to come up with a fresh approach for a World Campus poster campaign to run for one month in one car of the NYC Metro train system.
I reviewed the existing posters we had been working on since a few years and realized that they lacked focus, clarity and style, and they looked dated. I quickly realized that this was a chance to make a much larger change to our overall branding efforts for World Campus.
I love simplicity in branding.
So I took the most basic ingredients I could find: our blue and white colors, a simple white illustration, to “mark the spot”, our logo, URL and tagline, and a testimonial as headline – we trust testimonials of strangers more than those carefully crafted statements of companies who believe they own those brands, isn’t it?
Here is what this first poster looked like:
The result of this test was so encouraging that we decided to buy ALL advertising space on one of the PATH trains running between NJ and NYC, shuttling tens of thousands of commuters to and fro every workday.
We got such huge brand recognition and considerable milage on social media with this new design that we then decided to buy all available ad space in the largest metro station in three cities on the US East Cost: the Union Station in DC, the 36th Street station in Philadelphia and the Allegheny Station and North Side Station in Pittsburgh – all running for over a month in May 2016. We called it the Blue and White Station Domination:
Since then we’ve done many ads, online and offline, as well as taxi tops in NYC, and car and train wraps in San Diego:
