Honored for marketing campaign for inaugural AHA! Fest

Cleveland State University’s Marketing Office earned the Best in Show award at the 15^th annual Cleveland Rocks Awards, which honored the best marketing and communications campaigns of 2017. The ceremony, held at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum on December 12, was sponsored by the Public Relations Society of America’s Cleveland Chapter. CSU earned the honor for its comprehensive marketing campaign for the inaugural Arts and Humanities Alive! (AHA!) Festival held in partnership with Playhouse Square June 7-9, 2017.

The Best in Show award recognizes the entry that receives the overall highest score in the competition regardless of category. CSU was honored for developing a full marketing and communications campaign, including print, digital, social media and free media, which directly assisted in creating brand identity, name recognition and significant publicity for the festival. AHA! drew over 3,000 people to downtown Cleveland for a three-day celebration of the arts, books, music and humanities, featuring Pulitzer Prize winner John Meacham, playwright Delia Ephron and dancer Karina Smirnoff, among many others.

CSU also earned a Cleveland Rocks Gold Award for Best Event Marketing for the AHA! Fest and a Silver Award for Crisis Communications for its communications response to the hunt for the “Facebook Killer.”

The Cleveland Rocks Awards, which were created in 2002, seek to promote excellence in local public relations and marketing and acknowledge outstanding campaigns incorporating sound research, planning, execution and evaluation. The Public Relations Society of America is the nation’s largest professional organization serving the communications community. Its 30,000 members are comprised of communications professionals spanning every industry sector nationwide and college and university students who encompass the Public Relations Student Society of America.

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