CARBONDALE - Marketing professor Terry Clark doesn't need an ad to convince him Southern Illinois University Carbondale is a great place. He had his mind made up in 1972 when he first arrived, and even after a 10-year hiatus at Notre Dame and Emory University, he enthusiastically returned to campus several years ago.

Unfortunately, he says, his feelings won't come naturally to everyone outside the region, particularly with the thousands of students the university would like to attract to reverse recent, unhealthy enrollment dips. That is where good marketing is needed and where Clark, a specialist in marketing strategy, decided to put his efforts.

With the work of three groups of students - two in marketing and one in film - Clark now has a series of television spots stored on his computer, one minute-and-a-half commercial and three other 30-second clips that tout SIUC's offerings in contrast with the geography and activities that exists in Southern Illinois.

The ads look like they were produced by a professional firm, but they were really the extracurricular work of the students and Clark, who worked on the project in between his classes and his duties as chair of the marketing department in the College of Business.

Clark has been running the television spots to focus groups all semester, and while the ads don't represent any official university-sanctioned marketing campaign, the results, he said, at least show what is possible.

"After being somewhere like Notre Dame or Emory, I was just struck by the fact this campus has never had a marketing campaign, and that's the same as saying we've never told our story in a compelling way," Clark said. "I just wanted to show people what was possible, just the fact you could tell a compelling story. Oddly, because we've never done it before, just about anything we do will have a payoff."

The commercial's content is the brainchild of fellow marketing professor, Gordon Bruner, an SIUC employee for more than 20 years, who had thought about the idea so much once he was finally asked to provide a script, he wrote it in one night.

"Pretty much what you see to this day - although it's been re-shot and re-edited many times - is still my basic idea. Where can you do X in the morning and Y in the afternoon?" Bruner said.

The formula is utilized in the ad, for example, in showing SIUC as a place where students can practice with the symphony orchestra in the morning and go horseback riding in the afternoon.

"When you pair them, nowhere else will you find that combination," he said. "The idea is that no one else can make the claims we make."

Believe it or not, Bruner said, it wasn't an easy message to form.

"It's difficult to take marketing and apply it to nonprofits like universities," he said.

That is likely one of the reasons SIUC has done so little earnest marketing through the years. Bruner said it does no good to blame any one person or department for the oversight, because universities typically have many competing interests that, like advertising, consume money.

But, to see marketing as frivolous spending, Clark said, assumes SIUC won't get anything out of it. It also assumes a couple of well-placed commercials will save falling enrollment.

"What I am talking about is an institutional campaign, but marketing has many more facets," Clark said. "I'm doing what I can, but I'm doing it as a labor of love, not as a job."

If SIUC wants to begin telling a compelling story, the effort will have to come from all parts of campus and filtered through one overarching message, making sure each individual piece adds up to mean something, Clark said.

At the moment, Clark isn't sure the ads that have been produced will ever make it on television, but they will be shown to President Glenn Poshard within the next few weeks. From there, Clark said he'll have to see what transpires.

"If all that happens is a small effort, I'm not going to be discouraged," he said.

Poshard, however, said the effort should be large.

"If marketing can help us increase our enrollment, or build the right image of the university; if it can help us define the kind of student we're looking for, all of those things are huge returns on the dollar if the marketing gets it right," Poshard said.

The SIUC campus has already hired higher education marketing firm Simpson Scarborough to do an analysis, which will be reported to university officials Dec. 7. Poshard said he and SIUC Interim Chancellor John Dunn are preparing as many facets of a marketing plan as possible in anticipation of the report.

Marketing, the president said, is an investment worth making for SIU at this point.

"It's definitely not throwing away money; it is absolutely needed and necessary," Poshard said. "We have an image problem out there that doesn't match up to our real potential here. Marketing has to correct those kinds of things."

caleb.hale@thesouthern.com

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