Myron Oglesby-Pitts imagines advertisements for the Tennessee HOPE Scholarship on TV screens, billboards, hot-air balloons and buses.

She can see herself and staff members driving a "HOPE Hummer," a Humvee that could navigate the hills and valleys of the state's 95 counties, giving high school students and guidance counselors an impressive symbol of a college education made more affordable by lottery revenues.

All of those things, she said, might be necessary to get the word out about requirements for the lottery-funded scholarships available next fall.

But Oglesby-Pitts, the new deputy director of the Tennessee Student Assistance Corp., has other mountains to climb first. She'll need to do a lot of fund raising to supplement a state marketing budget of less than $100,000.

"That won't touch it," she said of the money available and the challenge of reaching hundreds of thousands of students, parents, counselors, teachers and principals.

The Tennessee Education Lottery Corp. hopes to sell the first lottery tickets by Feb. 10. Revenues will pay for HOPE and other scholarships and grants designed to keep students in state for college.

That plan is simple enough. But even with a new, red-white-and-blue HOPE logo ready to go, Oglesby-Pitts and other state education officials are realizing the complexities of explaining the scholarship requirements in a way that is concise, catchy, accurate and far-reaching.

The basic, $3,000-a-year scholarship, for example, has been touted as requiring either a B average 3.0 high school grade-point average out of a possible 4.0 or a score of 19, out of a possible 36, on the ACT college-entrance exam.

But it isn't quite so easy to explain.

The GPA must be on an unweighted scale, meaning it must be computed without extra points for honors or Advanced Placement courses. Students must earn the 3.0 in college-prep classes and overall. They also must score 890 on the SAT, out of a possible 1600, if they take that instead of the ACT, which is more common in Tennessee.

Add in different requirements for four other types of awards, and you've got a tall marketing order.

"It is very complicated," Mary Morgan, director of communications for the Tennessee Board of Regents higher education system, said during a meeting last week of state officials working on the issue. "But the fact that it's complicated doesn't mean that it doesn't need to be accurate."

It also will need to be somewhat flashy to connect with 18-year-olds, Morgan added in an interview. Leaflets and speeches probably will not be enough.

"You can't expect high school guidance counselors to be able to get information in the hands of every student in a way that they'll absorb it," Morgan said.

But Oglesby-Pitts is counting on those counselors to do what they can. She has hired three people to cover the state and visit schools to make sure everyone has the right information.

Pat Cole, guidance coordinator for Metro schools, said that she will bring counselors together before Thanksgiving to make sure they understand the requirements. Brian Noland, associate executive director of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, said the state will need to have a marketing plan rolling by then. With GPAs rising and falling on every class, first-semester final exams will be "a high-stakes exercise," he said.

Beyond explaining how to get a scholarship, officials will need to say what HOPE won't get you: automatic admission to your favorite college or university. A 19 on the ACT or a 3.0 GPA will win a scholarship, but neither is likely to make the cut for admission to the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

Current college freshmen who graduated from high school last spring also will need to know the rules, because they will be eligible for scholarships next year. (Students who graduated from high school before 2003 will not qualify.) UT and some Board of Regents schools have started talking to their students.