Early on Friday, Feb. 24, Jennifer Londoño-Salazar’s routine was disrupted by texts, emails and phone calls from professors and colleagues congratulating her for a recent cameo.
Londoño-Salazar had no idea what they were referring to.
Amid all the messages, she found one from OU President Joseph Harroz Jr. announcing the launch of the university’s $2.75 million brand campaign and its new campaign video.
Londoño-Salazar, a doctoral candidate researching chemistry and biochemistry, had previously volunteered to participate in the video in fall 2022. She appears twice, working on a robotic hand.
Seeing herself in the video reminded her how OU made her dreams possible.
“You work so hard for your dreams. For myself — this little kid from Colombia, dreaming big, getting my Ph.D. — seeing myself in this video made me think: ‘I’m making it. It’s possible,’” Londoño-Salazar said. “It sounds cliche, but anything that you can dream about you can make it happen.”
The university’s “There’s only one Oklahoma” campaign rolled out two weeks after the Big 12 announced OU and the University of Texas will move to the Southeastern Conference in 2024, a year earlier than anticipated.
Launched officially on Feb. 24, and over three years in the making, the campaign intends to show all sides of the OU community, from research and academics to athletics and school spirit, said Jennifer Schultz, OU Health senior vice president of marketing and external relations and a leader of the campaign.
Over a few weeks, the campaign made its way to billboards, transit ads and TV commercials, with more planned for the coming months and years, Schultz said.
Schultz helped create and lead OU’s efforts for the campaign, calling it a “labor of love” that consumed much of her job. OU’s Marketing and Communications team collaborated with 160over90, a public relations and marketing agency based out of Pennsylvania, as the lead agency.
'There's only one Oklahoma' branding on an OU bus on March 24.
In recent years, 160over90 has improved fundraising and enrollment at several other universities, namely four in the SEC: the University of Missouri, Texas A&M University, the University of Florida and the University of South Carolina.
At Mizzou, large-scale protests broke out at the university over the racial climate on campus in 2015, with several student-workers going on a hunger strike and the football team boycotting all football-related activities. Eventually, the protests led to the resignations of the university system president and Columbia campus chancellor.
Two years later, Mizzou’s enrollment decreased by around 30 percent. This led the university to sign a $1.27 million three-year contract with 160over90 in 2017 to rebrand and bounce back from the protests and changes in leadership, according to reporting from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
“Mizzou Made” sought to inspire pride in alumni and prospective students by showing the university had made “meaningful change.” 160over90 reported a 16 percent increase in applications just two years after the campaign’s launch.
Texas A&M hired the agency in 2015 after the president and director of athletics resigned. They later unveiled the “Fearless on Every Front” campaign, focused on fundraising.
160over90 reported the campaign raised $3.8 billion so far for the university, with 400 million earned media impressions.
The University of Florida’s campaign, “For the Gator Good,” aimed to raise the university to a top 10 public institution in the U.S. and increase fundraising efforts. According to 160over90’s website, the campaign led Florida to place seventh in the 2020 U.S. News & World Report rankings for public institutions and increased alumni giving by 17 percent since 2014.
The University of South Carolina and 160over90 launched “The Remarkable We” in early 2022, garnering 278 million impressions and 303,000 site sessions, according to the agency’s website.
For OU, 160over90 pitched an idea that at first felt too broad, Schultz said. That’s when the agency and OU Marketing and Communications decided to look back at a catchphrase used by OU football for over 18 years: “There’s only one Oklahoma.”
Steve Sturges came up with the slogan after OU lost 55-19 to the University of Southern California in the 2005 Orange Bowl.
“It was one of those things that happened in the heat of a really bad defeat,” Sturges told OU Daily. “I was sitting there, and I was trying to justify who we were and really look at us as a program rather than just a team in the moment. That’s what came out. … I love it. This is kind of my gift to the university.”
That next football season, Sturges’ catchphrase debuted in a promotional video before the start of a game.
“There’s only one, Billy Sims” and “There’s only one, Adrian Peterson” kicked the video off with the same phrases being used in almost every subsequent OU football promotional video to date. The head coach typically finishes off the video, saying “There’s only one Oklahoma” at the end.
Eighteen years later, the university finally decided to claim the phrase for the entirety of OU in their new rebranding campaign.
“It seemed like one of the taglines that clearly worked in other contexts, including athletics. There’s only one,” Harroz told OU Daily. “One flagship university. One academic health system. There’s only one University of Oklahoma. For students and prospective students, there’s only one of you the same way there’s only one OU.”
Schools like Mizzou and Louisiana State University also use “There’s only one” for advertising and to promote school pride, especially in athletics. Harroz said OU did it first and that it applies to OU best.
OU has ownership and visibility with “there’s only one,” Schultz said. The phrase is an opportunity to take a well-known aspect of the university and its intellectual property and leverage it to better tell OU’s brand story, Schultz said.
Schultz and Harroz both said the campaign, which comes at an opportune time as the university heads to the SEC, is mainly centered around telling the story of OU and the real stories of the OU community.
“Inside of this brand are things that are unique and distinct. We as students, we as faculty, alumni, members of the community, we're all unique and distinct,” Schultz said. “In ‘There’s only one Oklahoma,’ there'll be a story of a student who came to OU and their life was changed because of their experience at the university.”
Two of these stories are Londoño-Salazar’s and the future story of the Grant family.
Ronald Grant met his wife, Brenda Palomino Grant, at OU while he studied business administration and she studied zoology and biomedical sciences. Next year, the couple will watch their son start his college career at their alma mater.
The family found out about a casting call for an OU branding video in late 2022, and on a whim, decided to make an audition tape of them sending their kid off to college.
Their 13-year-old son grabbed his iPhone while the family shot a simple scene outside their house as the parents helped their son pack his car, hugged him goodbye and watched him drive off.
OU’s creative team reached out saying they loved the emotion Brenda had and an additional blooper reel their 13-year-old son submitted of the family dog coming into frame and their oldest son dancing. They asked the Grant family to be in the video.
OU’s creative team met with the Grant family several times to get footage,and Grant said the result was amazing because the video focused on all sides of the OU story.
“When my wife and I first heard about college, we thought, ‘Oh, it's just a place for smart people,’ and ‘You have to have money.’ And then we got there, (and) we realized we totally belong,” Grant said. “This video does a good job of showing all the different kinds of perspectives and the ways that you can belong at OU.”
Grant said the college experience has changed since he and his wife attended OU, but one thing remained the same.
“There really is only one Oklahoma,” Grant said.
'There's only one Oklahoma' branding on a poster on the door of the OU Student Affairs office on March 24.
Schultz said the campaign was focused on the distinct stories of specific people, research and athletics at the university.
“(We were) trying to put something together for an institution with the history and tradition of the University of Oklahoma, where you can really become anything. You can study dance, you can go to law school, you can go to medical school or nursing school,” Schultz said. “There's such a wide array of things that you can do that's available to you at OU.”
Schultz and Harroz said they see the brand going everywhere, with Harroz saying the university can never be too humble in sharing its story. Schultz said the branding will cover things like OU’s websites, billboards in Oklahoma and other states, and fundraising efforts.
Schultz said the brand is about what makes OU special: its people and stories. Londoño-Salazar said the video successfully captures what made her dreams a reality.
“All of us are sometimes in a different universe, but our story matters,” Londoño-Salazar said. “Athletes who overcome injuries, me coming from Colombia to OU, learning a new language — it is really inspirational. A lot of people can relate to your story. It’s cool to get to tell your story.”
Summer 2023 Crimson Quarterly
This story was edited by Jillian Taylor, Alexia Aston and Jazz Wolfe. Francisco Gutierrez and Ansley Chambers copy edited this story.
