How Goldey-Beacom College built a graduate program from scratch using a single marketing medium: rideshare advertising.

When Goldey-Beacom College, a private university in in Pike Creek Valley, Delaware launched it’s newly created Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) program in 2018, it had a bold slogan: Hit the ground running.

“We wanted to communicate to prospective doctoral students that we didn’t have our head in the clouds,” says Dr. Dan Young, a longtime educator who was tapped to shape Goldey-Beacom’s newest program. The university touts the DBA program as ideal for working executives interested in advancing their careers and taking part in valuable research and problem solving.

“We were a very down-to-earth school,” Young says. “With the practical knowledge gained from our program, our graduates are ready to hit the ground running as soon as they got their degrees and shift their careers into high gear.”

With that in mind, Goldey-Beacom found an advertising platform that would perfectly tout the program’s mission: It partnered with Carvertise, the nation’s leading rideshare advertising company, to wrap a fleet of Uber and Lyft vehicles with the program’s bold blue-and-gold branding and deploy them throughout their target markets.

The head-turning vehicles traversed the streets in and around northern Delaware and also made appearances at events where prospective doctoral students were likely to congregate, such as the university’s spring graduation ceremonies for business students. Each of the vehicle’s drivers were handpicked by zip code and logged in more than 1,200 miles per month, ensuring that Goldey-Beacom got maximum mileage from its campaign.

Young, who first met Carvertise’s founders, Mac Macleod and Greg Star, when they were just launching the company 10 years ago while still attending school at the University of Delaware, remembers being impressed with their vision for their fledging company.

As a marketing educator himself, Young says he’d long been schooling students on the “marketing wear-out” that happens with most advertising mediums. “I just don’t think a lot of marketing stands out anymore,” he says, calling mediums like billboards, digital advertising and radio and TV spots “completely saturated. Once you see an ad on a billboard one time, or listen to a commercial on the radio, or spot a pop up ad on your computer, you stop really seeing or hearing it after a short while,” he says, “Your mind says, ‘I’ve already seen or heard that,’ and you become numb to it all.”

But what impressed Young about the Carvertise medium was that the wrapped cars really stand out. “When you’re driving down the street, you’ll mainly see a field of blue, white and tan cars,” he says, “so a brightly-colored car with a captivating slogan or a unique logo on it is automatically going to grab your attention.” The fact that the vehicles are in motion increases the impact of the advertising message, Young says.

In the case of Goldey-Beacom, the nature of the wrapped vehicles jibed perfectly with the doctoral program’s mission— to hit the ground running — providing further impetus for Young to launch a campaign.

“We wanted to show that our students were going to set their careers in motion via our program, and everything about advertising on a wrapped car fit in with that narrative,” he says.

Goldey-Beacom didn’t have a large marketing budget to build its new DBA program; in fact, “our investment in the Carvertise campaign was literally the only outward marketing we did,” remembers Young. “People either heard about us through the campaign or via word of mouth: that was it.”

Young began gathering anecdotal evidence that the campaign was working shortly after the vehicles were deployed.

In one memorable case, he says, a student who signed up for the program said she had been weighing all different options to continue her schooling to the point “where she had become seriously stressed out,” Young says. “She said she actually prayed for God to send her a sign on what she should do.”

As luck would have it, the woman said, shortly after she said that prayer, a Carvertise vehicle touting the Goldey-Beacom DBA program drove past her line of sight. “She immediately told herself, ‘That’s where I need to be,” Young said.

Some might chalk up that up to a serendipitous moment, but Young said other DBA students tell him about their memorable moments seeing their future school’s name on a wrapped car. And there’s plenty of hard evidence showing that the medium has worked for the university: In the three years following the ongoing campaign’s launch, Young says the DBA program has become the fastest-growing doctoral program in the region, boasting more than 65 students in 2021. To go from zero students to that number of students in just three years is huge,” Young says. “And the fact that our only marketing was through the wrapped cars is a big testament to the power of the medium.”

Goldey-Beacom isn’t the only program in the higher education realm that’s found quick success by partnering with Carvertise. Facing alarming drops in enrollment following the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, community colleges, universities and trade schools across the country have partnered with Carvertise to deploy fleets of cars wrapped with their unique and memorable logos to the communities they desperately need to reach.

“Now more than ever, our education partners are looking to pursue a more grassroots approach to outdoor marketing, carrying their messages directly into their target markets,” says Greg Star, Co-Founder of Carvertise. At the same time, he says, many are embracing the opportunity to wrap student’s cars, in lieu of Uber drivers, to serve as mobile brand ambassadors, combining an approach of mobile advertising and experiential marketing.

Among the recent success stories: Earlier this year, Delaware Technical Community College deployed a fleet of branded vehicles driven by the school’s students, alumni, faculty and staff throughout New Castle, Kent and Sussex counties for a year-long campaign that’s expected to generate a whopping 10 million impressions.

Star says that as schools continue to face a challenging recruitment period in the coming months, more and more are looking to Carvertise as a unique solution to bolster enrollment.

“Our educational partners tell us that our branded cars are the most compelling outdoor advertising medium they’ve ever seen,” Star says. And there’s data to back up their contention: Statistics from a 2019 Nielsen out-of-home study reveal that wrapped cars have proven to be the most effective and memorable form of OOH advertising available.

Those statistics don’t surprise Young at all — especially when one considers the challenge of marketing to a student population, which is heavily made up of Gen Zers. “To get students attention these days, you need a lot of action and movement on the ground, not a static billboard up in the sky,” he says. “Goldey-Beacom’s DBA campaign is proof positive that wrapped vehicles accomplish that, in a very exciting way.”