Carnegie Mellon Buys Into Product Placement in Films

University agreed to filming on campus in return for prominent use of the college name throughout the movie.  Could be a symptom of the transformation of universities into corporate Educational Maintenance Organizations. 

Taking their branding strategy to a new level, the marketing communications people at Carnegie Mellon University (EIN 25-0969449 Form 990) took the relatively unusual step of making sure that the school's name was featured prominently in the movie Smart People, which was filmed on campus last fall. 

An opinion piece by CMU Prof. Jeffrey Williams in the Chronicle of Higher Education claimed that the college had agreed to the use of the campus, with the proviso that the school's name appear at least twice in most scenes (the article is subscription only, but you may also find it here).  I thought It might be a tongue in cheek comment, but a university press release quoted Marilyn Kail, Carnegie Mellon's assistant vice president for marketing communications corroborating: "by having this movie feature the university prominently, we're building national awareness for Carnegie Mellon."

CMU currently ranks 21 in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of America's best colleges, tied with UCal Berkeley.  This kind of aggressive marketing could move the institution into the top twenty (by displacing Vanderbilt, Rice, Emory, or Notre Dame, which rank right above it).  Prof. Williams thinks it might be the next best thing to having a major football team carrying the brand.

He also mentions that CMU is working on global branding, with campuses in Qatar, Adelaide (Australia), Kobe (Japan), Athens (Greece), and Silicon Valley (California). (Most of the overseas campuses have a focus on information technology.)  He's not too happy about this trend and fears that universities may be in the process of consolidating around the strongest brands.  He cites the work of Marc Bousquet about the emergence of Educational Maintenance Organizations, analogous to HMOs in the health field. 

To me, it's nothing particularly new.  I don't believe the claim that charity and nonprofit organizations are now or ever were a third sector, set apart from the public and private realm.  They have always been fully engaged as instruments of both and have always been places to make a living.  And part of this has always been fund raising and image building, using whatever tools of marketing communication are popular at the time. 

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