Campus Solutions Inc, is an alternative out-of-home advertising company targeting students at universities and colleges all across the country. Bryan Carbone, founder and President of Campus Solutions, Inc., sat down to discuss the uniqueness of his company.
Bryan, tell us a little about Campus Solutions, Inc.
Campus Solutions is a college marketing agency targeting college students both on and off campus. We started with sampling through brand events in areas where students typically gather, such as student unions and student centers. We do things from a student’s mentality utilizing our experience in OOH. We’re handling creative and staff, we research secure places on campus and find the biggest events for our clients to participate in. We find the best back to school events with 20,000 students in attendance; they’re the biggest one-day events where clients can have the most hand-in-hand interaction with students. We’ve always had brand ambassador programs. There are companies like ours who do tabling, posters and fliers with street teams, but we do more than that. We also do a lot of bar events off campus with coasters and barware. Approximately 60-70 percent of our programs are on campus and 30-40 percent are completely off. We are a smaller company allowing us to maneuver ourselves and change based on the client’s needs.
You mentioned that you have previous experience in OOH. How did you get started?
I founded the company soon after college. I graduated with a degree in marketing and was doing brand ambassador work throughout college. I also developed a designated driver 
program for college kids called Cab Card. It was a way to curb drinking and driving on campus. I worked on that company and then a couple of years after I graduated. While I was working on Cab Card, I was also working for an OOH media company in New York called Encompass Media Group. Eventually I combined my own company with what I learned about the OOH industry to form Campus Solutions. And, actually a lot of our team came from an OOH background. It’s a very niche industry but we’ve all come together. My team was doing fun things like post card media before they came to Campus Solutions. We all have that OOH media experience which really allows us to do things both on campus and off.
There are several other companies who do advertising on college campuses. How do you stand out from others?
What makes us unique is a combination of things. We have a segment of a niche college females, which is our biggest focus. We have the largest sorority and fraternity greek network. We have relationships with the chapters on a chapter-by-chapter basis. We know the presidents, the treasurers, the social chairs and we connect our client’s brands to the sororities and execute in-house.
What do you mean by “in-house”?
We have really great girls-night-in parties for clients such as Cosmo, Clinique and Revlon within the sorority houses. We make them a lot of fun and do things like contests between different sororities. For example, we had a great contest for Clinique. I called a sorority to let them know they won the contest and I just hear 50 girls screaming in the background. Then we go back with all of this makeup and nail products as their prize. So, we really try to reach these sorority women through our greek networks, but we also work through our back-to-school events and doing things like college tours. You have all of the freshman women on campus for the first time, and it’s a great opportunity for clients like Revlon to make those critical brand relationships. It’s fun for the college women, the clients and our team too.
OOH often gets a negative reputation by not able to give adequate data showing their effectiveness. How do you manage that?
We really pride ourselves on completing the entire package by providing things like photos and testimonials. Certainly, there may be a few bad apples in the industry, and, fortunately, I think we have gained from that. Clients will work with another company, and their needs aren’t met or they just don’t get the product they were looking for. We prove to them by working with them semester in and semester out that we can meet their needs. Having a good reputation is the most important thing in such a small community, honestly. Your reputation follows you. My wife and I have always treated others how we want to be treated. We’re not going anywhere. We’re going to be around for years and years and I think that has a lot to do with our reputation and what we provide to our clients.
Interested in learning more about Campus Solutions, Inc? Check out their profile!
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text or overpowering images, brands should rely on negative space to captivate the audience and force their eyes directly where the brands want them. The Big League World Series mastered this art of simplicity in their 2016 OBIE award-winning billboard. With just a baseball player in full swing, and black, open space behind him, the billboard utilizes negative space, forcing eyes onto the baseball player and the short message reading “Heads up. July 28 – Aug 4. #BLWS”. The billboard is simple in copy and imagery, but striking to the eye. 
virus. Kraken Rum featured a bus stop with Kraken-like tentacles coming from the sides. And Coke created an interactive ad that gave Coke in exchange for a smile. All of these are examples of the creative freedom that other media cannot provide. An audience will be captivated and engaged with unique, creative ads. OOH is able to connect and push that engagement into other advertising mediums, such as social or online, making OOH an essential part of successful campaigns.
hat got the company into the event world. Originally we were Moderne Promotions. The company started in nightlife events and quickly grew all across the country with a broad range of event types. Then in the late 90’s, I developed another arm of what is today Moderne Communications, called Moderne Mosaic. Moderne Mosaic was our own media network. We started with a couple thousand Neighborhood stores in Chicago and it has grown to over 100,000 media networks today, spanning coast to coast. In 2006, we developed our third arm called Moderne Interactive, which brought us into the digital and interactive world. Soon we realized we needed to bring our three arms under one name. In 2007 we formed Moderne Communications. Today, we offer over 66 non-traditional marketing, experiential, media and interactive services. Our motto is “non-tradition is our tradition.”
