ADVERTISING is hard work, and doubly so when your target population is college students. What other collection of individuals can boast having both the workload of an ant and the attention span of a fruit fly? Thus, when student groups set out to attract their peers to various meetings, rallies and concerts, they've already got a difficult task ahead of them. Even with the advent of the e-mail list, reaching out to students beyond those within your own organization still poses substantial problems for students who want to draw a crowd. For most contracted independent organizations, the best way to accomplish this task is one of the oldest and simplest: Stick flyers everywhere.
There is, however, another obstacle adding to students' advertising woes should they choose flyering as their method of choice: a lack of good advertising space. CIOs are encouraged by the University to post their flyers on bulletin boards located throughout many of the buildings on Grounds, but I know from my own experience that these are often not effective places to advertise. While staff do leave these boards alone for several days at a time, the competition for space on them is so intense that most flyers will be posted over in far less time. In addition, most of the boards are so hopelessly cluttered that even the most cleverly designed flyers will garner scant attention.
Facing these dilemmas, many CIOs feel the need to break the rules and post their flyers in public places where they will actually be noticed. The most common area for this sort of advertising is the colonnade near Bryan Hall. The area contains just the right combination of plentiful surface area for flyers and guaranteed visibility among students to make advertising there worthwhile. But even here students' efforts have been frustrated by the University's policy of tearing down these flyers often and unexpectedly. In my experience there has been no consistency in the University's decisions to clean the colonnades and other public areas of flyers. As a result, CIOs can only guess when putting up flyers will be effective advertising or simply a waste of time and resources.
In an interview, Student Council President-elect Darius Nabors lamented the situation, saying that while clubs may be given enough opportunities to advertise, "There aren't enough good opportunities." He emphasized that students need to be given "a consistent place that they can flyer or a place where they advertise." In that vein, he presented a plan to install LCD screens in Newcomb Hall that would exist solely for student advertisements. He explained that CIOs could submit their advertisements digitally and Student Council would compile them into a daily slideshow that could be shown on screens throughout the building. If the program proves successful, he said, they would place additional screens in other buildings around grounds. Nabors said he hoped to have the screens installed in Newcomb by the start of the fall semester. In the meantime, he explained that Student Council was working on other solutions to the lack of advertising space such as the information kiosks that have been popping up around grounds lately.
While the LCD screen idea holds great promise for the future, other solutions are needed to solve the problem both in the short and long term. The kiosks may also help ease the problem, but providing enough surface space to truly alleviate it would require an absurd number of them. According to Christina Morell, assistant vice president for student affairs , while there is no over arching advertising policy for the entire University, her office is working on creating a policy that will both "afford appropriate avenues for groups to advertise while keeping the appearance of grounds at the level we want it." She emphasized, however, that opening areas like the colonnades to advertising is not under consideration.
The University has a legitimate interest in keeping their public spaces from becoming cluttered with advertisements, but the current setup of trying to rip down flyers in prime advertising areas faster than the students can put them up isn't serving the needs of either party. A better solution, at least in the short term, is that the University should recognize that for the foreseeable future CIOs will continue to need to advertise in these areas. The University should set up a regular schedule for its removal of flyers and make that schedule available to CIOs, giving students a means of marshalling their advertising resources and allowing the custodial staff to do their job. At the same time, Student Council needs to keep working with the administration to find ways to provide more advertising space, whether it be as advanced as LCD screens or as simple as installing more bulletin boards. This being one of those rare instances where all parties involved agree on the need for action, it would be a shame for so many trees to continue to die needlessly.
A.J. Kornblith's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at akornblith@cavlierdaily.com.
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