An uncommon video for Uncommon Minds

Best Employer Brand Video - Westpac Group

The best advertising is when people can see themselves in the ad.

So we made it happen.

The brief

Westpac bank’s Grad Program had already established a unique brand over 5 years with our ‘Uncommon Minds’ campaign. Our brief this year was to build on this brand and increase applications from the highly competitive STEM sector while still attracting independent thinkers and innovators from all areas of study.

An uncommon approach

We wanted students to think about their own uncommon mind when they viewed the video, so we took a ‘meta’ approach (not Facebook meta) by featuring students - potential grads - observing and reacting to our current grads in the creative.

We developed a two-pronged media strategy, with a paid LinkedIn video campaign highly targeted to STEM Students and an outdoor campaign on campuses and bus stops around the universities in Sydney and in the city surrounds.

It’s here where we filmed the two hero videos, on campus and at bus stops, with our potential grads observing their Westpac counterparts' uncommon minds and having their own uncommon mind unleashed.

The uncommon minds imagery we used were drawn from each of our grad’s authentic hopes, dreams and experiences. We featured four actual grads from different streams to show the diversity we look for in building our grad cohorts.

Any Sydney university students that saw the hero video on LinkedIn would instantly recognise their campus and could project their uncommon mind into the scenario. They could also wait for a bus at the actual location of the video and see the poster our hero grads were reacting to in the video.

Reinforcing videos

Anticipation was created prior to the application date by a series of three videos on LinkedIn where we popped our grads heads open to reveal the ‘Watch this space’.

Similarly, urgency was created at the end of the application period with a series of three videos revealing the words ‘Applications closing soon’. We enrolled our existing grad cohort to share the videos widely across their LinkedIn network, while our new grads were given 'celebration' videos to share their successful recruitment to the grad program.

Results

All up the campaign featured: Two hero videos, 6 support videos placed nationally on LinkedIn, 40 locations across Sydney outdoor, still and video, 34 locations across university campuses in Sydney.

Tying the video campaign to the outdoor campaign was a roaring success. We had a 64% increase in total applications, a 30% increase in hires from a STEM background, and hired candidates from over 26 different universities.

By engaging grads in their own environment with a unique visual language, sharing their authentic hopes and dreams and airing video messages of urgency and celebration at the appropriate times in the Grad’s recruitment cycle, we smashed previous application results and continued to add incredible uncommon minds to Westpac’s workforce.