Best of CASE District V Award
 

Institution: Oakland Community College

Title of entry: 2024 Holiday Video

About this entry: The goals of Oakland Community College’s holiday video were to increase engagement with student and employee audiences, create a sense of community with our new mascot, Talon, and to wish viewers happy holidays. An unofficial goal was to showcase OCC’s Chancellor having fun. (For proof, check out the bloopers at the end.)

OCC incorporated the use of AI, a hot and sometimes controversial topic, as the story’s foundation. Chancellor Provenzano uses AI to brainstorm ideas for featuring the College’s new mascot, Talon the Owl. The results are clips featuring Talon along with OCC students and employees in classic and rom-com holiday movies as well as "Die Hard," which the Chancellor deems as “definitely not a holiday movie.” Fun fact: we actually did use AI to help generate the list of movies selected to showcase.

The video was released in our Chancellor's yearly Seasons Greetings email, employee and student newsletters, intranet and social media. As part of our marketing strategy we added Instagram and emailed it to the College’s K-12, legislative, Michigan community college and county government partners.

The results: the highest number of holiday video views in OCC’s history. OCC’s 2024 Holiday video finished with 11K views across all platforms, up from 3.3K views in 2023. Additional recognition from our peers was given by the national newsletter, Inside Higher Ed, which featured OCC's video as one of 14 colleges for its break-through idea and engaging treatment. This was the second consecutive year OCC was recognized by Inside Higher Education.