College of the North Atlantic (CNA) took home a gold award on Friday from the Canadian Council for the Advancement of Education (CCAE) conference in Saskatoon, SK.
The Prix d’Excellence is the annual awards program from the CCAE which recognizes outstanding achievements in alumni affairs, public affairs, communications, marketing, development, advancement services, stewardship and overall institutional advancement.
CNA’s Marketing and Communications Department took home the gold award for the college’s
#WrongSong campaign in the Best Print Ad or Poster category. The
#WrongSong campaign was created with the assistance of Target Marketing and Communications to promote the Music: Performance, Business & Technology program’s relocation to the Prince Philip Drive campus in St. John’s. The campaign featured a series of posters that were placed around the city of St. John’s featuring the misheard lyrics from popular songs and using the hashtag #WrongSong to engage with people through social media, who in turn shared their own misheard lyrics. The copy on the posters said: “Don’t just learn the lyrics, learn the business. Music: Performance, Business & Technology is coming to St. John’s.”
According to Stephen Lee, CNA’s Manager of Marketing and Communications, this is the first time the college has received an award from the CCAE.
“The Prix d’Excellence awards are considered among the highest level awards that can be won for marketing in Canada in our industry of post-secondary education,” said Lee. “The winners list is often dominated by large universities with huge marketing budgets and multi-million dollar campaigns, so to be included among this group is quite an honour and shows that a good idea, well executed, can have a lot of impact and be really effective.”
Lee says the response to the #WrongSong campaign on social media was fantastic.
“Before we even had a chance to begin promoting it, people were seeing the posters, taking photos of them and tweeting or posting them to Facebook and including their own misheard lyrics,” says Lee. “We tweeted at one of the hosts of the morning show of our provincial radio station OZ FM and they jumped on board, tweeting their own misheard lyrics and even running their own Wrong Song radio contest.”
Stephen Lethbridge, host of OZ FM’s The Rush morning show, and the rest of the crew use a lot of humour in their broadcast. He says the college’s campaign dovetailed nicely with what the station tries to do.
“Music is obviously a big part of what we do, and the way people digest that music especially,” says Lethbridge. “We hear songs get called all sorts of things besides their actual titles so the #WrongSong campaign was something that hit close to home for us – and great, as College of the North Atlantic's Music programs equip the next generation of Newfoundland and Labrador's musicians to continue our province's proud musical tradition!”
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Media Contact:
Glenda McCarthy
Public Relations Specialist
College of the North Atlantic
709.643.6408
glenda.mccarthy@cna.nl.ca