By Sam Deere

Would you give your phone number to a stranger? How about your email address? Discounting those who find themselves doing so late on a Saturday night, most of us have reservations about giving our details to people who we don’t know. However, as soon as that stranger tells us we could score a free drink or a novelty inflatable baseball bat, or go into the draw for the ultimate party adventure with three friends while meeting your favourite sports star and consuming copious quantities of a certain product, we’ll hand out our phone number and email like it’s going out of fashion. Of course, in contrast to the drunken 3 a.m. exchange of details, this stranger isn’t interested in your amazing personality and witty conversation. They want to subscribe you to their marketing list, so they can inform you of the latest specials on flights or toothpaste or whatever wares they’re peddling. Well done – you’re another satisfied customer ‘engaging’ with a brand.

Here at the University of Adelaide, O’Week is about two things. There’s the actual orientation – meeting tutors, having the Vice-Chancellor tell you how lucky you are to be a part of this great institution, finding your lecture theatre, finding the quickest route from said lecture theatre to the bar– and then there are the events. Everyone gravitates to the lawns, because that’s where the fun happens, and of course, that’s where the marketers hang out. But why are they there? Who let them in? What business do they have entering hallowed university grounds, where nought but lofty thoughts and academic excellence should be allowed? Clearly, someone stands to gain from the arrangement, but who?

Leanne Bruno is Events Coordinator at Adelaide University Union. She’s a busy woman. This time of year is taken up largely with organising O’Week. Hundreds of companies apply to be a part of O’Week – the usual suspects being banks, government departments, food and beverage companies and travel providers. Most operate stalls or give out samples, but some also sponsor activities or get to be part of the O’Week ‘showbag’. Leanne mentions that she knocks back dozens of companies, as there just isn’t enough space. She also confirmed that previously some companies have marketed on-site without AUU permission. Clearly, the benefits of foisting your product on potential customers outweigh the possible risk of a reprimand from Security Services.

So, what is it about the university set that inspires marketers to go to such lengths? Obviously, the more people know your product, the more potential customers you have. But surely there are easier ways than going on campus and handing out flyers and product samples? Well, perhaps not.

University students are often regarded as their own demographic, as distinct from other 18-25 year olds. According to Roger James, CEO of the Australian Marketing Institute, students in this fast-paced and fancy-free modern world are far more critical of marketing than their predecessors:

“One of the challenges is that we all know that you guys are a lot [better] than we were when we were young at recognising what you think is a scam, or seeing through ploys that you don’t think are honest”.

Tim Addington, Editor of the advertising trade magazine B&T adds:

“[The student market] isn’t necessarily harder to crack, but [marketers] have to go about it in slightly different ways. Students are more cynical towards the traditional advertising messages, so marketers have to come up with slightly different ways of engaging that audience”

Both Addington and James concur that the best way to engage students in a brand is through ‘experiential marketing’. Experiential marketing is about getting the demographic to interact with your brand, through someone handing you a product sample, like a can of drink, or giving you a role in shaping the brand. Anyone feel like some iSnack 2.0? The traditional advertising media of TV, radio, print and billboards just don’t cut through like they used to.

So if the student market is difficult, or at least costly to crack, why are marketers interested? Addington and James suggest that students are such an important demographic because they straddle the line between being in control of their spending, but not being set in their ways (as opposed to, say, the 30+ demographics). Brand loyalty means repeat customers. If a student has a ‘positive brand experience’ while young and impressionable, chances are they’ll lean more towards that brand when the superannuation pays out. Furthermore, Addington notes that engendering brand loyalty in students pays off, as people with degrees tend to have higher incomes.

Andrew Maloney is the Managing Director of Student Services Australia. SSA has an arm called Student Marketing, which is Australia’s largest campus-focused marketing agency. He agrees that the traditional marketing avenues just don’t work anymore, not necessarily because students are cynical, but because they aren’t heavy consumers of TV or print media.

Despite Leanne Bruno’s claim that Adelaide University attracts more than enough sponsors, Maloney doesn’t really buy the idea that companies are beating down the door in order to market directly to students during O’Week.

“Theoretically, it should be easy [to convince corporates to market to students]. Roughly a quarter of the 18-25 demographic are on campus. The problem is that it’s extremely fragmented. So we spend a lot of our time trying to convince corporates to come to campus. They look at it and say ‘my god this is complicated’. For example, O’Week isn’t during the same week around the country. Every university has different policies, different pricing. It’s an incredibly complicated thing to do a national O’Week campaign. It’s the same with student media – if you want to run a full page ad, [in a student newspaper] they’re all different sizes and you’ll have to do the ad in ten different ways, with ten different prices, on ten different dates and ten different [people to contact].”

Can’t you play the brand loyalty card? “That’s crap,” says Maloney, “corporate Australia now is based on quarterly results. This idea that students are future purchasers… If I went to a company and started talking like that, they’d look at me like I was an idiot. They want a result in the next 12 weeks.” Apart from a few exceptions such as The Australian, which is heavily subsidised on campus, companies don’t seem to take the long view. According to Maloney, the extra effort of coordinating a marketing campaign across 30 campuses means companies are more likely to phone to Nova and spend $300,000 on an ad campaign that can be rolled out in hours, instead of waiting a week for Student Marketing to tailor a cross-campus package.

Life’s tough for marketers. Well, so what? Big companies finding it hard to push goods on the student demographic isn’t exactly the stuff that makes your heart bleed. In fact, couldn’t we do without them? Of course, that logic belies the reason that a student organisation would take on marketers in the first place.

The problem that students and student organisations face is having enough money. Adelaide University Union lets companies market on campus because without their money, most events just wouldn’t be possible. University administration actually requires the Union to run events at O’Week as part of its funding arrangement (cynics might hazard that this is because activities are the only way to get students to attend the more boring orientation events). Leanne Bruno says that without extra funding, the week just won’t go ahead.

Moreover, while O’Week has the highest concentration of events and marketing, campus culture persists through the year. Funded through the AUU via the Clubs Association, clubs on campus must find a way to subsidise events if they are to put a student-friendly price tag on whatever drinking session they’ve thinly disguised as a masquerade ball or games night. Alex Arney is sponsorship manager for the Adelaide University Engineering Society and AUSki, the snow skiing club. He says that sponsorship is about helping the members.

“The sponsors themselves help subsidise events. For example, [the AUSki] Snow Ball would have cost us six grand, but sponsorship took a couple of grand off. Most events you have to run at a loss, sponsorship just goes toward making sure that you’re not charging the members as much as possible.”

Additionally, the AUES has a much more professional focus in terms of sponsorship, with companies coming on board for careers nights. These arrangements are a way of exposing members to less obvious career pathways.

Perhaps the starkest reminder of the benefits that marketing confers is the concept of ‘student discount’. If student organisations disengage from corporate marketing, corporates will disengage from students, and take their cut-price flights, low-fee bank accounts, two-for-ones and 10-percent-offs with them. Maloney sees the trend as worrying.

“In the last two years neither Telstra nor Optus have been on campus. That’s amazing. Ten years ago, Telstra and Optus would sponsor O’Week, and now they’ve withdrawn from campus. Where’s the Optus or Telstra deal for students now? They’ve gone.”

What of the effect of voluntary student unionism, recent bane of Australian student organisations? Leanne Bruno thinks that sponsorship is more important post-VSU because of funding cuts, but Andrew Maloney notes that the promotion on-campus and in student papers has dropped dramatically as few student organisations can afford a full-time marketing manager. Ultimately this is a double blow, and as a result there are far fewer events for students. RMIT in Melbourne has its O’Week completely run by university administration. As the Adelaide University Union has both an Events Coordinator, and a Marketing Manager, campus culture has suffered less, but no organisation can go from having a budget of $9 million to $1.2 million and provide the same level of service to its members.

Sponsorship, then, provides part of the backbone of services to students. Without it, campus culture would be a shadow of what it is now. However, such reliance on external parties with vested interests comes at a price.

One problem is that having an event sponsored by one product tends to preclude student choice. If your major sponsor is Red Bull or Carlton Draught, you don’t want to tread on any toes by allowing V or Coopers on-site at the same time.

Furthermore, developing an event with marketing in mind can significantly change the tone of things, or at least the activities that are on offer. This year there will be no free barbeque, as it draws too much focus from other activities, limiting advertising exposure. Paying a dollar for sausages might still be a pretty good deal (and the money supports the clubs who volunteer to cook them), but one can’t help but feel like students have lost out

Another troubling aspect of acquiescing to sponsors could conceivably be a compromise of student media independence. While it might seem like a far cry to suggest that On Dit could manage to uncover a web of deceit and dodgy dealings perpetrated by a sponsor, and then be forced to suppress it, it would be a shame if people couldn’t speak frankly. The care taken in this article to only talk about Union sponsors in the abstract is a case in point.

However, ultimately marketing on campus provides positive outcomes for students. This isn’t to say that constant branding isn’t annoying, but it is at worst a necessary evil, particularly in a post-VSU world. Marketing off-campus is perhaps a thornier issue. The recent debate surrounding advertising junk food to children raises concerns that marketing may be contributing to serious health problems (small wonder that marketing tobacco products has been illegal in Australia since 1992). Nevertheless, despite the notorious excesses of national or global corporatism, campus marketing appears to be mostly benign. Without it, students wouldn’t have the anything like the range of events and services currently available on campus. And hey, at least you got that free drink.