Postgraduate education has faced big challenges in recent years, with career hopping on the rise and students seeking smaller bites of learning – even YouTube is a competitor. Paper Moose won a competitive pitch to help UTS create a new strategy and campaign to tackle this fast-changing education industry.
University marketing efforts have lifted across the board in postgraduate, but our research showed a key insight into the competition: they’re all working hard to inspire our audience.
So, our creative instead focussed further down the funnel, to make this already inspired audience feel in control of their destiny – in a move to drive real action and prompt actual enrolments.
The upside to this new career landscape is that we now have the power to pivot into anything we choose. It’s up to us.
‘Invent you’ reminds people that they’re in the driver’s seat, and that their current self is responsible for their future self. To be the person they want to become, they need to take action and do something today.
Our visuals show a person with their own silhouette projected beside them. This represents their current self and the version that they want to become.
Black and white photography was chosen for a more raw and authentic look, contrasting the cliched smiling students of tertiary education ads. This also alludes to our individual potential – that our most fulfilled selves may still lie ahead.
In one of the fastest pivots we’ve done, Paper Moose worked with UTS to create a sub-campaign in reaction to the Federal Government’s announcements of new covid fee assistance.
We knew people were actively questioning their life choices during lockdown – resulting in many leaving the city or considering new professions. We evolved ‘Invent You', to a more immediate call to action: ‘The time is now’.
As an extension of the campaign, we inverted the colours and added a visual cue symbolic of a clock. This alluded to the benefits of the short postgrad courses and reflected the unique time and opportunities we were experiencing. We were the first to market in NSW for the newly announced courses.
This was the best advertising campaign in the university’s history:
We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land upon which we create, the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation. We pay our respect to their Elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.
Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.