In the world of 2024 social media and marketing, the analytics and data devoted to measuring the true return on investment of influencers for corporations are staggering. Even universities are looking for unique ways to stand out in a crowded and competitive world of admissions. How do they reach prospective students still in high school in a way that leaves a lasting positive perception of their school?
Decades ago, we witnessed the beginning of what would become university influencer culture in the late 1990s. I was the Penn State recruiting coordinator around that time, and we had a group of recruiting interns that worked in the office and with us on game days and on visit weekends.
They were male and female students that went through an interview process and had to understand NCAA rules and ethics. On home football Saturdays, while coaches were putting their players through pregame warm-ups these interns would take the recruits and their families on the field to watch.
Around that time, a clothing company mailed me a letter and catalog offering to outfit our interns in specially made apparel. It would be branded through Penn State and sold at stores. They saw the interns as influencers long before influencers existed.
Given Penn State’s relationship with Nike, we felt we should run this by Budd Thalman, the associate athletic director for communications. He wanted to make sure that using another company’s apparel did not run afoul of Penn State’s agreements with them.
Within a week or two we heard back from Nike. They outfitted our interns for game days with officially licensed gear. And that was the first influencer experience on a minor scale many years ago.
At that same time, Guido D’Elia and the company Mind Over Media were producing the Emmy-Award winning football highlight show “The Penn State Football Story.” The show was unique because it was student-athlete centered and fast-moving. All the other football highlight shows featured the head coach and a host talking about the game’s highlights. That approach was really static.
Joe Paterno wanted a show that was not centered on the head coach. Instead they built the show around the total college football experience, highlighting the program and the players to fans and recruits.
Nearly 30 years ago, the Penn State football story stood out for creating content that could be transferred to easily digestible, web-sized segments. There were campus tour clips hosted by people like Michael Robinson, Bryant Johnson and even Penn State women’s volleyball All-American Terri Zemaitis.
Segments were produced showing players’ hometowns. The entire 1995 season took viewers through all the inner workings of a game week. In other years, the TV crew filmed players in class. During a segment following Bryan Scott to class, one of those unscripted moments popped up.
A faculty member stopped the film crew. He wanted to tell them a story on-camera. He had called the football office to talk about a player who’d missed some classes. The professor relayed that this player was in danger of failing and wanted to ask Joe Paterno what he should do.
Joe asked what the prof would do if he wasn’t a football player and the prof said he’d flunk him. To which Joe told the prof, “If he deserves to flunk, then flunk him.” Surprisingly several recruits’ parents even commented positively on that professor’s comments.
The new approach helped boost recruiting, because it was natural and authentic. That peer-to-peer influencer approach soon spilled to other parts of Penn State
The show’s reputation led Penn State’s admissions office to hire Mind Over Media to create imaging, branding and new projects to boost applications. Guido, Mike Messner and the company created new ads, new imagery and a new approach. One of those approaches was light years ahead of its time.
In the early 2000s they created an on-line reality show with content that highlighted student life at Penn State. The “webisodes” were called “First 30” and followed a handful of students on a reality-show journey through their first 30 days as Penn State freshman.
The Penn State TV, online and print ads for admissions were also different. They cast current students in a campaign that was themed “It’s Your Time.” The students in the ads became recognizable people on campus and beyond.
The new approach highlighted life at Penn State for real students beyond selling the stats of academic rankings and research dollars or Fulbright Scholars. It was peer group advertising in a space where it had not previously existed.
Applications jumped. And as that upward trend took hold, Penn State’s academic rankings soared. Penn State peaked at No. 37 among national universities in the US News and World Report rankings, reached No. 3 in the Big Ten (behind Northwestern and Michigan) and was ranked the No. 8 public university in the country.
In the 2024 world of influencers and NIL and social media, it is easy to think all of this is new. It is easy to think that it all just appeared in the last few years. But even at a place like Penn State, years ago a visionary utilization of the tools of the time set the university apart in the roots of the influencer model of that time.
