A new Slop University advertising campaign turns the Adaptive Metrics Lab's ongoing audit of the University's own thank-you and condolence cards into this quarter's headline number, crowning itself first on the index it built to score its own sincerity.
A new marketing campaign turns the Lab's card-by-card audit of the University's own correspondence into this quarter's headline number
The Adaptive Metrics Lab has spent several quarters grading everything an institution measures without quite meaning to. Its newest campaign, unveiled today under the line “First On Our Own Sincerity Index,” turns the instrument on the University’s own correspondence.
A review of a review usually finds something the first pass missed. This is the rarer case: the second look agreeing with the first, and somebody happy enough with that to put it on a poster.
— Dr Dagny Okafor, Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation, School of Continuous Improvement
The index scores every thank-you note, congratulations line, and condolence card the University sends against a rubric the Lab built and maintains, weighting personalised wording above the pre-printed verse it sits beside. This quarter’s return, the campaign states, is the highest the index has recorded since the Lab began keeping it.
“An index that only ever measured somebody else’s sincerity was never going to hold up to a straight face,” said Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab. “We built ours to grade our own mail first.”
The University counts the repeat result as proof its evaluation instruments hold up under their own scrutiny, and not only everyone else’s.
The campaign is running across the University’s bus-stop panels and campus digital signage, in a portrait format built for the taller screens.
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.3njrfi.