That’s a billboard I must pass a dozen or more times a month, but I only recently noticed it. Clearly in these hard economic times, the U is really trying to push distance learning… but this attempt feels more like a feeble shove than a real push.

There’s several other billboards around town, most noticeably the one on I-275 downtown that makes me feel like I’m about to launch into near-Earth orbit. They also had a real big outdoor ad campaign during football season, where they tried to implant the respective images of Matt Grothe and George Selvie into everybody’s brain. During any type of USF game on TV, there’s also a commercial they run made with still photographs (remind you of anything?) and music that sounds like Kraftwerk (unfortunately no one has deemed it interesting enough to post it to YouTube).

I bring this up in order to contrast it with the commercials that Kaplan University have been rolling out:

Really, they’re just breathtaking. Others have reacted similarly, some even go so far as to call it e-learning’s equivalent to Apple’s 1984 ad. It did come with a hefty price tag: the cost for the campaign was supposedly in the millions.

I’m not asking USF to spend that kind of cash. I only ask that they heed some advice from Uncle Phil:

Light beer advertising fascinates me. I’m not a light beer drinker, so I can’t tell one watery beer from another, which is probably why these companies always have such vague arguments in favor of their product. Bob Garfield at Ad Age has (quite hilariously) noted how Coors Light has essentially co-opted the world cold (and trains! Everytime I hear “Love Train” I think about beer!) and how Bud Light has taken on the attribute of drinkability.

Now, I’m no expert on beer, but I should hope that beer (or any kind of beverage, for that matter) should be drinkable. I imagine the Bud Light people probably caught on to this point (after being laughed, taunted, and made to go sit in a corner), which is why they seem to have completely changed the direction of their ad campaign to explain just what exactly drinkability is.

After having a good chuckle about how they’ve had to change their concept so drastically, I actually found it to be kinda funny. Self-deprecation is always good, especially if you’re a giant European corporation (InBev) that has recently been attacked for buying up an “All-American” company and laying off 6% of it’s employees.

Now if only all bad instruction was so enjoyable.