Sisters Lauren and Madison Haring were so blown away by the special Valentine’s Day dinner served up on the University of Nebraska Lincoln-campus, the Colorado natives began filling their parents’ phones with pictures and texts of praise.
Tables with red linen, sparkling tableware and napkins folded to look like red roses.
And the food, including fillet mignon presented with spears of asparagus, and for dessert a drizzled strawberry cheesecake.
For their mother, Adrea, it was just another example of the great experience her daughters were having at UNL. Feeling grateful in the moment, she called the school and left a voicemail.
“This phone call is a simple kudos to you and your staff for all that you do. I just think you guys are great and I’m glad my kids are students there, and I think the school is special,” Andrea said, her voice cracking with emotion. “Sorry for getting emotional, but I just love that my girls get to experience all that UNL offers, and I thank you for all that you do.”
That authentic voice is now providing the soundtrack for a UNL commercial that’s being featured during national sports broadcasts this year.
It’s the second straight year UNL has used real-life audio to voice a new commercial spot to run during televised Cornhusker football and volleyball games.
Last year’s commercial featured the voice of the late Johnny Carson, the UNL grad speaking poignant words about his home state that were drawn from a TV documentary made decades earlier.
Carson’s familiar voice and words of home helped the ad strike an emotional chord with Nebraska audiences. With the new ad, once again it’s the real voice that provides the heart-appealing heft, said Aaron Nix, the school’s director of visual media.
“It’s the voice, just somebody who’s being real for a second,” Nix said. “It takes you out of the mindless loop of commercials that usually play during TV events.”
Ads sometime slick, formulaic
It’s long been part of televised college sports broadcasts that the competing schools each get to run a 30-second commercial promoting their institution. It’s a free opportunity for schools to sell themselves to a national audience.
Schools tend to hire outside agencies for the slickly produced, scripted and sometimes formulaic spots. They often feature vague slogans and images of goggle-wearing students holding beakers in research labs, or students in their school colors cheering on their teams.
But UNL has broken that mold with its recent spots — both produced in-house by the university’s marketing and communications staff, and both with messages not drawn from a script.
Last year’s Carson spot was intended to broadly engage all Nebraskans and invoke the pride they feel for the university and state, Nix said. That ad was a finalist for a regional Emmy award, and is still aired by the university today.
Nix said the school wanted the new ad to appeal more directly to students and their parents. But he again wanted it to feature a real voice.
He mentioned during an early planning meeting that he’d like to find a voice message or real-life recorded conversation to use for sound.
Serendipitously, his boss then told him about the moving message that had just been played in the chancellor’s executive leadership meeting that same morning.
“I heard it and said, ‘That’s it,’” Nix said. “I immediately wanted to talk to the mom and hear her story.”
But just who was that thankful mom?
Sisters find home 450 miles away
The Haring sisters Lauren, a UNL senior, and Madison, a sophomore, grew up in Greeley, Colorado, with parents, Ken and Andrea.
While all were native Coloradans, Ken’s mother had lived in Nebraska until she was about 11, and she raised her son a Cornhusker fan. That helped put neighboring Nebraska on the radar about five years ago when Lauren began looking at colleges.
Lauren visited the Lincoln campus and liked it, UNL recruited her harder than any other school, and she decided the university 450 miles away was her new home.
Listen now and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS Feed | SoundStack | All Of Our Podcasts
Though Lauren was having a great experience, younger sister Madison made it clear to her family she would be blazing her own path for college. But after visiting a number of schools, she found she couldn’t stick to that plan.
“I’m going to Lincoln,” she announced to her parents, well familiar with the school after frequent trips to see her sister.
In fact, not long after, the entire family decided to matriculate to Nebraska.
Ken was hired by the University of Nebraska Medical Center as chief building official, and Andrea landed a job with UNMC as a finance and grants specialist. They now live in Omaha. And even Ken’s parents decided to join them in Nebraska, too.
During Madison’s first days on campus a year ago, she texted her family.
“Maddog has never thrived more,” she wrote in the third person, using the family’s nickname for her. “This is the best place on earth.”
Such texts and photos are common among the close-knit Harings. The girls on a regular basis update their parents about something “awesome” in their day, Andrea said.
They tell of student life, special events in the dorms, club activities, interactions with friends and staff, and the available academic support.
Then in February, Madison won the chance to go to a special campus Valentine’s dinner in a raffle. She decided to bring her sister as her “date.”
Soon pictures from the event in the Willa Cather Dining Center were popping up on their parents’ phones.
“It was, ‘Look mom, look dad,’ and with each message coming in, my husband and I were thinking, ‘That school is so awesome,’” Andrea said. “And then I thought, ‘They should know.’”
She found a number and left a message on the phone of the university’s director of dining.
She isn’t sure why the emotional inflection came to her voice as she spoke.
But as a parent, she said, you put a lot of trust in an institution when you send your children away from home for the first time, and want to know they are in good hands. The accumulation of her girls’ time at UNL made her feel grateful to the school and the people there who make their experience possible.
“It matters for my kids and it matters for me as a mom,” she said.
Ad still moves mom to tears
After Nix first heard Andrea’s voicemail, he reached out to the Harings to see if they would be willing to help the university produce the ad.
Film crews spent hours on campus with both Lauren and Madison last spring. Nix wanted the video behind Andrea’s voice to likewise be as authentic as possible. So Lauren and Madison were filmed during their regular campus activities and while interacting with their real friends.
They filmed Madison hanging out with her “Schramm-ily” in Schramm Hall dorm, Lauren meeting with the women in entrepreneurship club, and both girls at a favorite campus study spot.
Wording on the screen indicates the voice was taken from an actual voicemail.
Production was completed over the summer, and the ad aired for the first time in late August during the Huskers’ football and volleyball openers.
Like the Carson spot, the reaction has been very positive, Nix said, the commercial seeming to particularly resonate with parents.
“If somebody’s opening up about something that’s really heartfelt, and you can hear it in their voice, it makes you start to feel something,” he said.
As soon as the commercial hit the airwaves, Andrea started getting calls and texts from friends in both Colorado and Nebraska asking, “Did I just see the girls on TV?”
She said still cries every time she sees it. Because it reminds her of her family’s feelings for UNL.
As she put it simply, “We love the school.”
cordes@owh.com, 402-444-1130, twitter.com/henrycordes
Be the first to know
Get local news delivered to your inbox!
* I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy.
Henry J. Cordes
Reporter – Metro News
Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily!
Your notification has been saved.
There was a problem saving your notification.
{{description}}
Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items.
Followed notifications
Please log in to use this feature
Log In
Don’t have an account? Sign Up Today