A new Slop University advertising campaign puts the Strategic Drift Survey's method to work on a café's morning forecast call, joining the University's bus-stop panel and campus digital signage rotations.
A new signage campaign stages the School of Emergent Priorities' drift instrument on the ten seconds it takes to decide whether the awning goes up
Not every Slop University campaign has a degree to sell. This one starts with a stack of café chairs, a folded awning, and the several seconds it takes someone to decide whether the tables go out. The School of Emergent Priorities has built its newest signage push around the gap in the middle.
A forecast promises the morning. The awning is what the morning actually decided.
— Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Strategic Drift Survey, School of Emergent Priorities
Unveiled today under the line “The Gap Between Forecast And Fact,” the campaign stages Dr Adegoke checking a handheld reader beside a café’s stacked outdoor furniture, the awning still folded and the morning’s verdict not yet made. It joins the University’s bus-stop panel and campus digital signage rotations, and the University treats the pairing as worth advertising in its own right.
The instrument is the same one behind the School’s annual Strategic Drift Survey, adapted here for a single morning rather than a full institutional cycle: a forecast stated, an outcome logged, and the distance between them given a number.
“It’s the same discipline as any of our committee papers,” said Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor of Futures in Committee. “We just don’t usually get to watch the recommendation and the outcome standing ten metres apart before nine in the morning.”
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.tnp8xb.