Challenge

Te Herenga Waka asked us to produce a series of recruitment campaigns and films promoting the university and its different degrees and faculties. How could we connect with potential students who share the university’s values and goals, and help people understand the unique benefits of studying at Wellington's university? And how do we build the relevance and resonance of Te Herenga Waka’s new brand expression ‘Where do you stand?’ in the process?

Solution

To celebrate ‘Where do you stand? in a way that was compelling for each individual video and its specific audience, we first worked with the university at a brand level. Together we developed detailed guidance for applying the brand expression to the creative in a way that carries meaning and value for prospective undergraduate and postgraduate students, lining up with their varied mindsets and life stages.

To create a visual sense of unity and identity across all creative assets, we proposed a ‘master’ aesthetic and narrative approach to represent the action-packed, interesting, exciting, hectic yet beautiful life of a student in Wellington. A creative device broad enough to allow some films to lean more into a slower pace, while others are more fast-paced and high energy.

With this creative platform and aesthetic as our framework, we approached each brief individually to target the goals of the university, degree or faculty, and the needs and mindsets of each audience. Traversing documentary-style content and scripted messaging, we created a beautifully hectic undergraduate recruitment campaign; a postgraduate series to inspire action and exploration; a video for students coming to Aotearoa from overseas; a series highlighting the real world impact of the faculty of Science, Health, Engineering, Architecture, and Design Innovation (SHEADI); and videos outlining the broad application of the Bachelor Degrees for Arts, Communication and Music. Each hero film has cutdowns for use across social and digital platforms, along with tactical assets for performance marketing use - all combining to make a suite of hundreds of promotional storytelling assets.

Impact

This work had a staggered roll out with more assets yet to go live, but the campaign has already helped Te Herenga Waka stand apart from its competitors. By February 2023 results included:

• More than 15 million views on the Undergraduate films
• Over 310,000 clicks through to the website from the Undergraduate films and tactical assets
• 1.7 million completed views on the SHEADI videos, driving a 76% increase to SHEADI web pages
• 2.2 million views on the Postgraduate videos
• And over 1.7 million potential international students in the USA fully viewed the Postgraduate videos.

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