Good Ol' College Try.

Take a pill - it's just an ad! After a couple of weeks of buzz, the lid is off College Ontario's "Obay" viral ad campaign (how many puns can we get into one paragraph? Hmm?), which prominently ran advertisements featuring a faux pharmaceutical and had people scratching their heads.

With the unveiling came a shiny new web site and fresh ads with overlays ("Don't push your kids into doing what you want.") designed to get parents and students thinking about options beyond university. Options are good.

I think it was also a clever, cooperative way for the province's colleges to leverage economies of scale and generate a positive, proactive campaign. I can't imagine that getting 24 colleges on the same page in order to run something so different was easy (now that's collegial). Now that the curiosity factor has peaked (as opposed to the past couple of weeks when it was piqued), however, I'll be curious to see how effective the rebranding strategy is going forward. Given how many students do not end up going to university, it still offers an important message.

As much as I liked the campaign, I still find it a little odd that most of the advertising was done in and around public transit, yet seemed to be targeted toward parents. That might work in Toronto, where the TTC enjoys a broad demographic, but in some of the province's other college towns and cities, I think you'd find the majority of riders would be the students themselves.