‘Hey, Hewes’
One of the advertising class’ groups proposed a campaign that focused on Hewes Library’s ability to help students via text messages,
“The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.” – Albert Einstein
MONMOUTH, Ill. – A group of Monmouth College students would like people to remember that sentiment from the world-renowned physicist and have it replace a popular refrain heard on campus: “The only reason I go to the library is to get a bagel at Einstein’s.”
Those students are in professor Tom Prince’s advertising class, and for one of their projects this semester, they took on the College’s Hewes Library as a client. They split into four groups and created video and print pieces the library could use to increase its visibility on campus.
The groups made their presentations Thursday morning with library staff in attendance, including Library Director Sarah Henderson.
“Every group took a somewhat different path,” said Prince. “Our goal going into this was, ‘Let’s find out more about the library and see if we can help.’ Advertising is about informing people of goods and services that are important to them and that they need to know about.”
“This has been absolutely wonderful and gone beyond what we expected. All four campaigns are fabulous. There’s something in each one that could be something wonderful for the library moving forward.” – Sarah Henderson
Henderson said the students’ work will be a big boost to Hewes Library.
“This has been absolutely wonderful and gone beyond what we expected,” said Henderson at the end of the presentations. “All four campaigns are fabulous. There’s something in each one that could be something wonderful for the library moving forward.”
‘Hey, Hewes’
Prince joked with his students that when he first suggested the library as a client, it was “met with overwhelming silence, and not because of honoring the silence that is expected in a library.”
But as his students learned more about the services Hewes Library provides and got to know the individual personalities of the staff, he said they “got more excited.”
“And we had extremely energetic clients,” said Prince. “In the world of advertising, you don’t experience that all the time. It was a very unique collaboration.”
Prince’s students noted a few hurdles the library has to overcome, including being known only for its Einstein Bros. Bagels shop on the main floor and not being as convenient a location to study as the Center for Science and Business.
One of the student groups did a very concentrated campaign, focusing on the library’s ability to help students via text, which Henderson agreed is an “underutilized” service that she and her staff provide.
The students made three separate videos of Henderson, Technical Services Librarian Lynn Daw and Public Services Librarian Anne Giffey, showing them at work on a favorite hobby before responding to a text, much like Batman responds to his distress signal. Playing off the voice-activated commands of “Hey, Google,” or chatting with Amazon’s Alexa, they also created a colorful “Hey, Hewes” logo, which they said could be put on stickers or T-shirts.
Another group had an underlying message of “Who can you meet at Hewes?,” which had the multiple meanings of running into other students there and the library’s helpful staff, but also meeting “a million historical figures” whose stories are told in the resources available at the library.
The final group to present stressed getting to know the librarians, introducing them as a “dream team” in a video with the same intro music used by the Chicago Bulls when announcing their starting lineups. The librarians were also pictured on slides designed to look like trading cards, which could be printed and displayed in the library or other locations.
The first group to present did so via Zoom, stressing the advantages of Hewes Library over the CSB and suggesting several mottos for the library to adopt, such as “Some want to change the world, we want to help.”
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