Month: February 2008

Ontario Colleges has unveiled the second phase of their marketing campaign on their website. If you live in Ontario, you’ve probably encountered the first phase of the campaign, the mysterious “Obay” ads (which I covered here, here and here).

Here’s what the main page of the site says:

When it comes to post-secondary education, there are options

And whether you’re a teenager or a parent of one, we urge you to explore them all. University is great, but it’s not for everyone.

Unfortunately, parents often only see the future they want for their kids, rather than the future that their kids want for themselves.

Pressuring your children into a specific school or career may seem like what’s best, but it’s usually quite the opposite. It certainly won’t guarantee them success, and in many cases, it only delays it.

Why? Because the child is stuck in a course or school that they haven’t chosen, that doesn’t motivate them and that they have no emotional investment in.

If you’ve never considered an Ontario college education before, please take a few moments and have a look. You may be surprised at what you find.

Academic Snobbery

There exists a bias – a bias against college or any other post-secondary option that isn’t university. We consider it a form of snobbery.

This results in too many teenagers being pushed in the wrong direction – usually by their parents. “As long as my children go to university, I’ve done my job”.

Many of these parents are university graduates themselves, and have had successful, rewarding careers. They just want the same for their children. The problem is, times have changed and the path they took no longer exists or may not afford the same opportunities. Perception is no longer reality.

It’s an interesting ad campaign, but will it work? I know for certain that it’s got that certain “every opinion has equal merit and every person has equal potential” sort of vibe that will land it on Stuff White People Like (probably as a follow-up to entry #47, Arts Degrees). I seriously doubt that these ads will have any effect on my mom or other parents from cultures where education is considered to be of paramount importance. (I can hear it now: “College is for the gwai lo.” “Lowered expectations is so goyische.”)

The Video Campaign

In addition to the print/poster ads and the website, Ontario Colleges has also produced three cinema ads, shown below:

Birth

Gray’s Anatomy

Kindergarten

…here’s a quick visual guide to telling the difference between Japanese and Filipinos, courtesy of this old World War II filmstrip:

You’ll find more filmstrips on this page.

Be aware that there are several varieties of Filipino:

[via BoingBoing]

In the What’s Online section of today’s New York Times, the theme is Suburbia’s March to Oblivion and one of the topics is Obay. The article links to my first post on Obay as well as Torontoist’s article.

It’s official: according to this story at Canada.com — Mystery Ad Gains Momentum: Whodunit? — the ads for “Obay”, which have been popping up all over Ontario are the first wave of a viral advertising campaign for Ontario Colleges.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Though Scientology and anti-pharmaceutical lobbyists have been widely named as suspects in the Obay whodunit, detective work by Canadian blogs Accordion Guy and Torontoist have pegged Ontario Colleges as the likeliest source of the ads – which despite being clustered in eastern Canada, have gained national attention online.

Questioned about their involvement with the campaign, Ontario Colleges spokesman Rob Savage was cautiously vague (“at this point, we don’t have any information we can give you”), but told Canwest News Service he would follow up before the end of the month about the “long-term marketing stuff” being undertaken by the organization.

They’re being quite generous: Torontoist really did the detective work. I merely reported that someone on a mailing list to which I subscribe mentioned a connection between the Obay ads and Ontario Colleges; the people at Torontoist investigated much further.

For those of you not familiar with the Canadian use of the words “university” and “college”, here’s a quick explanation:

• University refers to a post-high-school institution that generally can grant many levels of degrees — bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, doctorate degrees and so on.
• College refers to a post-high-school institution that generally can grant bachelor’s degrees, as well as certificates and diplomas.

Universities are perceived as more prestigious than colleges; in some circles, college is seen as where you go if you just university is out of your grasp, whether intellectual, financial or status-wise. The Obay ads, now that it’s known who’s behind them, are probably a campaign that promotes Ontario Colleges by poking fun at parental pressure to go to university and to show that a college program is a viable choice.

The thing I found most interesting about the Obay ad campaign is that the ads are a sort of Rorschach Test — the psychological test in which you’re shown inkblots and you’re asked to look at them and describe what you see. For the people who commented on my original article as well as for commenters in other places on the net, the Obay ads seemed to reveal their “hot buttons”. Various commenters saw the ads as:

• A commentary on the some parents’ use of drugs to make their teenagers more compliant
• A Church of Scientology campaign against psychology and psychiatry
• A call to arms against mindless conformity
• Culture jamming by media-savvy pranksters
• Yet another example of the “billboard child-raising nonsense” and “the absolutely flawed ideas of the left and the simply retarded ideas of the hopelessly stupid”
• Yet another example of the hippie “I have unresolved feelings of rebelling against my parents” metality
• Actual ads for real behaviour-altering drugs for your kids
• Just stupid

Since these ads are all over Toronto and since about one in three people in the Toronto area has a Facebook account, it’s no surprise that there are three “Obay” Facebook groups:

• Obay Ads
• Obay Campaign
• Obay: If they won’t do it your way it’s time for Obay!

Colleges Ontario will host a media launch next Monday that, according to Torontoist, will reveal “the news behind Obay and its side effects on Ontario’s Post-secondary Education.” Torontoist will cover that story.

On a related note, here’s a parody ad from This magazine, a publication with a very progressive slant, courtesy of Torontoist:

Click the photo to see it on its original page.