A new Slop University advertising campaign turns a café loyalty app's unmoving satisfaction score into the occasion for the University's own ranking brag, joining the bus-stop panel and campus digital signage rotations.
A new campaign turns a café loyalty app's motionless satisfaction score into the occasion for the University's own ranking brag
A café loyalty app that has posted the same 4.2 out of 5 every quarter for two years, with head office declaring a new record each time regardless, has found an unlikely admirer in Slop University’s newest recruitment campaign.
An indicator that never moves usually means nobody is checking it closely enough. We checked closely enough to be sure this one simply doesn’t, and decided that was worth celebrating rather than fixing.
— Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Indicator Commons, School of Continuous Improvement
Unveiled today under the line “The Score Never Moves. We Call That Winning.”, the campaign stages a café counter’s unmoving satisfaction dial beside a gold stat lockup crediting the University’s own confidence composite with a fourth consecutive quarter on top. It joins the University’s bus-stop panel and campus digital signage rotations, in portrait rotation this time, part of the School of Continuous Improvement’s ongoing case that a number holding steady is itself worth reporting.
“A score that refuses to move is either broken or it’s telling you something true that nobody wants to hear,” said Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Senior Lecturer and Director of the Master of Applied Measurement. “We’ve decided to publish it either way, starting with our own.”
The claim on the poster is accurate in the sense that matters to the University that made it: the confidence composite behind “four quarters running” is assembled, kept, and read entirely inside the School of Continuous Improvement, and Slop University is the only institution it has ever scored. The School regards the result less as a boast than as paperwork, filed a quarter early.
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.4uwjlz.