Birmingham City Schools Get Super Bowl TV Air Time

By Greg Garrison | ggarrison@al.com

If you watched the Super Bowl on Fox 6 in Birmingham on Sunday night, you probably noticed commercials touting Birmingham City Schools.

“That’s exactly what we want,” said Sherrel Wheeler Stewart, executive director of strategy and communications for Birmingham City Schools. “We want people to take note of Birmingham City Schools.”

Birmingham City Schools has been running TV, radio and digital ads to promote its “Success Starts Here” promotional campaign, including two regional spots that aired during halftime and postgame of the Super Bowl on Sunday on WBRC-TV Fox 6.

Kamari Marzette, 2021 graduate of Ramsay High School’s engineering academy, starred in the Super Bowl commercial.

“When I started first grade at Birmingham City Schools, I had no idea what was ahead,” she said in the commercial. “My teachers nurtured my passion for math and science.”

The commercial showed her on the University of Alabama at Birmingham campus.

“Now, I’m doing research at the O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center at UAB, alongside world-class scholars,” Marzette said. “Birmingham City Schools prepared me. In a few years, I’ll have a degree and a bright future in research.”

The commercial concludes with Superintendent Mark Sullivan saying: “Birmingham City Schools. Success starts here.”

Birmingham City Schools is in the midst of a six-week, $267,000 advertising campaign that features TV ads, radio spots on several radio stations and digital ads on web sites including AL.com, Stewart said.

“We have radio ads going right now; we have ads going on AL.com, we have social media components,” Stewart said.

“If you look around the country, you see so many people who are graduates of Birmingham City Schools who are making an impact on our state and our world,” Stewart said. “We realize that some folks are newcomers to Alabama or to Birmingham and they don’t know that. So, we want to share that message. We want to see an increase in our enrollment. We want Birmingham City Schools to be the first choice in education for all students in this area. So, for that reason, we have an aggressive message program that we have initiated and we think it’s going well so far.”

The TV commercial that aired during the Super Bowl features text below footage of Marzette that says, “Birmingham Promise means free college tuition for BCS students.” Birmingham Promise is a program initiated by the City of Birmingham to offer free tuition to graduates of Birmingham City Schools.

“Promoting Birmingham Promise is a key part of that because you know that when you have a student who completes his or education in the Birmingham City Schools you get the added benefit of tuition for our public colleges,” Stewart said. “We are so fortunate to have other partners like UAB, which has provided some extra incentive along those lines … We want to emphasize that if you graduate Birmingham City Schools, not only do you get a high school education, you get assistance in moving to your next level either with a two-year or four-year degree in a public institution. We are very appreciative of Birmingham Promise and know the difference it is making in the lives of our scholars.”

Although the television ads will end after this month, the promotional campaign will continue all year through radio, digital ads and social media, Stewart said.