While the debate continues on whether marketing is more art than science, a new ad for the Ontario College of Art & Design takes the scientific approach as it looks for the square root of advertising greatness.
“Formula,” from Toronto agency Huxley Quayle von Bismark, touts the school’s Executive Masters of Design in Advertising program, launched last February.
The ad consists of a long list of big-name business and marketing thinkers arranged as a complex math problem on a blackboard. Ad agency execs such as Ogilvy & Mather’s Nancy Vonk and TBWAWorldwide’s Lee Clow are divided and multiplied by the likes of Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Virgin CEO Richard Branson. At the bottom of the ad is the problem’s solution: the school’s EMDes degree.
Andy Shortt, HQvB co-founder, said the ad “symbolizes all the different aspects, the formula, of what it takes to be one of the greats.”
The ad uses names and brands from a variety of disciplines to show that OCAD’s program covers “all these disciplines and people to create a new kind of hybrid thinker—the kind the industry needs moving forward in the new media landscape.”
The program groups agency and client-side marketers together for three two-week seminars to “improve their thinking, advance their knowledge and become leaders in a rapidly changing industry,” according to the school’s website.
The print version of “Formula” appears on the back cover of The One Club’s magazine, and the online video execution is appearing on industry sites such as AdAge.com, Creativity.com and MarketingMag.ca, and has been reviewed favourably by several industry blogs.
Both executions steer viewers towards OCAD.ca/Masterminds where interviews of program graduates appear in a video stream. The blackboard equation serves as the interviews’ backdrop.
This is HQvB’s second project for the school in as many years.
