Community | Inside PPAI PPAI Honors University Of Pittsburgh For ‘We’re Saving Your Spot’ Campaign THE UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH received the Best Branded Merch in a University Marketing Campaign Award on Wednesday during the American Marketing Association Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education in Las Vegas. PPAI – through its Promotional Products Work! campaign – sponsored the award for the second year in a row. For this award, PPAI asked nominees to submit brief overviews of their campaign, explaining how the branded merchandise that was used made a significant impact on the university’s campus. Josh Ellis, publisher and editor-inchief of PPAI Magazine, presented the award to the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA) for a promo-filled campaign that welcomed incoming graduate students. “Branded merch often gets overlooked in marketing and advertising, but it’s the only medium that gives the audience the opportunity to hold and touch the campaign itself,” Ellis says. “That creates real sensory connections that drive emotion and make for storytelling opportunities.” Behind The Campaign Each summer, GSPIA mails new students a welcome postcard, Pittthemed stickers and a similarly themed promotional product. For 2024, the theme stemmed from “The Steel City’s” tradition of using chairs to reserve parking spaces. The school wanted to connect this unique cultural element to the student experience by sending each new student a cell phone holder, custom designed like a parking chair. The message? “We’re saving your spot.” Libby Hilf, director of communications and marketing at the University of Pittsburgh’s GSPIA, conceived the campaign while shopping at Five Below with her kids. “I looked over at the dollar bin and saw the folding chair,” Hilf says. “It made me laugh because it’s a thing we joke about in Pittsburgh. We hadn’t yet decided what was going to go in the summer mailing, and they were only a dollar, so the price was right, and they were Pitt blue. Grad students live in apartments, and they have to fight for parking sometimes, so it aligned with their experience.” Once the campaign was approved, Hilf and her colleagues scoured Five Below stores in the area, purchasting well over 100 chairs. 82 • JANUARY 2025 • PPAI
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