From the Nominator

Part of UC Davis’s mission is to confront life’s most urgent challenges and to enhance the lives of Californians and those around the world. The university is perhaps best known for its primacy in agriculture, and indeed, it premiered a successful podcast in 2019 called “Unfold” that spent its first season covering the fascinating topic of food and food research. However, despite UC Davis’s many other areas of expertise, its name recognition is not yet commensurate with achievement in those fields. That includes our vital work on climate change—specifically, finding workable strategies to address and mitigate the problem today.

Early in 2020, UC Davis launched its “Outgrow the Expected” master brand strategy intended to raise the university’s reputational profile. One tactic was to better tell the story of our work on climate. As such, we launched the second season of Unfold to cover climate research, and bring to life stories covered by our Science & Climate web publication.

With stretched marketing dollars, the office of Strategic Communications hoped to micro-target local community influencers, including not just political and business elites, but also the ultimate influencers of prospective freshmen—parents and student counselors. Market research indicated that Capital Public Radio provided the best opportunity to reach those audiences through not just sponsorship radio play but also through an entertaining series of digital display ads (static and animated) placed on capradio.org.

From the Judges

UC Davis's Outgrow the Expected master brand strategy is intended to raise the institution's reputational profile. As such, they leverage an existing program that was well known within the community, Unfold, to cover climate research and bring to life stories covered by their Science and Climate publications. As a result, their podcast impressively reached 311,900.