Company: Ackerman McQueen
Headquarters: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Industry: Advertising
Company Size: Small (annual revenues of less than $50 million)

"The arts enhance the economic and cultural vitality of every community in our state, and by incorporating them into basic education, we are laying the groundwork to develop a fully-educated workforce."

- Jeanette Elliott, Executive Vice President, Creative Services

Objectives
To develop a multi-faceted public awareness campaign to support the efforts of The Business Circle for Arts Education, a consortium of education and business leaders who work to restore the arts in the curricula of public and private elementary schools throughout Oklahoma.

Process

• Ackerman McQueen created a campaign to support the efforts of The Business Circle for Arts Education. This campaign, called ArtsPower: Bringing the Arts Back to School, focuses on generating public interest, and recommending community actions which lead to restoring the arts in elementary school education.
• The core piece of the campaign is an Action Guide that provides specific examples of how parents, educators and the business community can collaborate to ensure that the arts are incorporated into every elementary school student's learning experience. More than 11,000 Action Guides were distributed during the first year.

The agency also developed a 13-minute video and six television spots, which were aired on 30 television stations, plus public service announcements, which were broadcast on 17 radio stations, as well as six print media ads, an eight-page brochure, a poster, a comprehensive Web site, www.artspower.com, and the artwork for the cover of the Oklahoma City area Southwestern Bell phone book, which promoted arts education.

Results
By developing the ArtsPower campaign, Ackerman McQueen was instrumental in raising public awareness statewide about the importance of arts education, which has resulted in the arts being restored in the curriculum of a number of schools in cities throughout the state. Recently, The Business Circle for Arts Education recognized schools in six cities for their leadership in developing model arts education programs. (2004)

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