"Team Detroit is an advertising firm located in, you guessed it, Detroit. When they were approached by the College for Creative Studies to create an ad campaign for the school, the firm decided to not go the typical, technology route, but rather, chose to go with good old fashioned poster designs. In the series, somber faces and hilarious, bright yellow captions immediately capture the viewer's attention and you can't help but smile at the variety of comical spoofs, where parents talk to their kids about the seriousness of...going to art school! The concept was a great success and Team Detroit says, 'After we created this series of low–tech posters, something amazing happened. They went viral. People started sharing them though blogs, Facebook and Twitter. People chuckled, then passed them along to their friends. Who knew you could blow up the Internet with a campaign full of print material?'"
(Katie Hosmer, 3 February 2013, My Modern Metropolis)
"College for Creative Studies's (CCS's) 'PSA' campaign, launched in September, has recently gone viral with more than 1,000,000 hits and shares on various social networking and blogging sites including Facebook and Twitter. Created by advertising agency, Team Detroit (Dearborn, MI), the campaign loosely parodies popular anti–drug campaigns from the 1980s and 90s. This light–hearted approach is intended to help recruit potential students to CCS...
'We understand that applying to an art and design College requires a serious commitment on the part of students and families. There is a competitive entry process and we offer students a rigorous education while providing graduates with a solid career trajectory,' says CCS President Richard L. Rogers. 'With this campaign we are able to convey a serious message in an amusing manner. We are grateful to Team Detroit for spearheading this great effort with their stellar pro–bono work. It is particularly impactful that CCS alumni Vic Quattrin, Brandi Keeler and Michael Burdick helped to develop the campaign.'
The entire campaign is supported by a fully–integrated marketing effort including print, broadcast, outdoor, cinema and online advertisements with the tagline, 'Talk to your kids about art school: a message from the College for Creative Studies.' It went viral due to a post from the Tulsa Oklahoma based Philbrook Museum of Art's Facebook page.
'As an institution that strongly embraces social media and its growing potential, we are always looking for compelling content to share with our online communities. This campaign certainly struck a chord with us on a humorous level, but it is the underlying sentiment and advocacy for the arts as a viable career path that made this campaign special. It was such a pleasure to play a part in this viral phenomenon,' says Online Communities Manager Jeff Martin, Philbrook Museum of Art."
(College for Creative Studies, Detroit)
[The 'PSA' campaign exploits the visual vernacular of public information campaigns such as the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.)]