News Story

The Monroe County History Center recently received thousands of photos from The Herald-Times that showcased life in Bloomington from the past 20-30 years. The photos were unmarked and left the center wondering what was happening in each photo. The center started hosting “What’s in the Photo?” sessions to ask longtime residents for help identifying people and places in the collection.

The center needed help encouraging residents to attend the sessions and help preserve history. IU Media School advertising students taking the Content Factory course in the fall semester were tasked with creating a campaign to increase public participation in identifying decades-old photos of Bloomington residents and events.

The Media School advertising course provides a hands-on experience where students work with clients directly. Creating an advertising campaign for the history center is one of two campaigns the students completed throughout the semester. The content produced from one group’s campaign would also be featured on the center’s social media sites and flyers.

Hillary Fleck, MCHC collections manager and MA’15, welcomed the class to the MCHC for the initial briefing and a tour of the center. She took them through some of the hundreds of photos that are being identified during this project and attended and reviewed the work in progress and final group presentations.

Divided into small groups, the class spent about seven weeks creating the campaigns for the center. After the final presentations, content from one group’s campaign was selected for use by the center.

The selected group included students Caterina DeSantis, Bliss Stengle, Jamie Porigow, Srika Sudheer, and Taylor Tinsley.

DeSantis, a senior and creative advertising major, said the group’s campaign wanted to make an urgent call to residents of Monroe County to say history will be lost without their help. The group included print and digital elements in their campaign to tell residents the photos don’t mean anything unless someone can help identify the people and places featured.

“All the print assets we used were photos from the collection,” DeSantis said. “Our headlines said ‘just another family photo’ or whatever the photo’s occasion was, then said ‘until you help us fill in the story.’ We also did animations where we took historic landmarks of Bloomington and edited them to fade away to send the message that history will fade unless it’s preserved.”

In the weeks that the groups worked on their campaigns, the students had to run ideas by the professor, Bill Schwab, and lead client presentations.

“We presented some rough concepts and then let the client lead where they wanted it to go,” DeSantis said. “It took us a while to figure out how to say what we wanted to say simply. Since the center wanted to use the campaign, we had to make sure it was producible.”

Stengle, a senior and media advertising major, worked on the chosen campaign and said the first challenge the group faced was figuring out how to reach the consumer.

“With something like this, our target is older community members because these photos are not recent,” she said. “That makes the target pretty narrow, so it was difficult to find out how to reach these people who may not be on social media.”

Of the content from the campaign, the group’s flyers and social media ideas were used by the history center on social media.

Stengle said it was most rewarding to see her group’s hard work pay off in a real-world environment.

“The thing about Content Factory is that it’s very competitive compared to other classes,” she said. “Reworkshiping our ideas and sifting through photos to try and find pictures was challenging. I thought everyone did such a great job.”

DeSantis also said it was most exciting to see some of their campaign content put to use by a real client.

“As a senior, I’ve done so much spec work for advertising campaigns and it’s really exciting seeing your work in the world because it mimics what I hope to do after graduation,” she said. “It was also great to see the community engagement with our content through likes and comments.”

The group is incredibly thankful for the opportunity to work with the Monroe County History Center in creating the campaign. The content can be viewed on the history center’s Instagram, Facebook, and X social media sites.