How to make a winning grad campaign twice as effective.

Outstanding Integrated Marketing Campaign - Westpac Group

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

So we made it happen.

The brief

For the past 5 years Westpac’s ‘Uncommon Minds’ campaign has been massively successfully in attracting independent thinkers and innovators from all areas of study to join our Grad Program.

Our challenge for this campaign was to evolve ‘Uncommon Minds’ both creatively and strategically to increase overall applications with a particular focus on the highly competitive STEM sector.

The concept: An uncommon approach

Strategically we knew if we wanted to beat the outstanding results of previous campaigns, we would need to do something dramatic.

So, we took our campaign directly to the students on their home ground – the university campus. We ‘flooded the zone’ with two short-form videos featuring two of our current grads and their uncommon minds playing on all campus video screens and a poster campaign on outdoor sites around the major universities. We made it almost impossible to attend a lecture or travel to or from university without seeing our grad campaign

Creatively, we wanted our campaign to connect with grad candidates by getting them to think of their own uncommon mind. We knew by now there was a good chance that many had seen our outdoor poster campaign while waiting for a bus outside uni. So, in our LinkedIn videos we featured two of our new cohort of grads waiting at the bus stop next to these very posters. We then animated these posters showing our current grads interact with the potential grads and unleashing their uncommon mind.

The uncommon minds imagery we used were drawn from each of our grad’s authentic hopes, dreams and experiences. In all, 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.

By targeting STEM graduates on LinkedIn and taking over UTS campus video screens we were also able to make STEM a priority.

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 words ‘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 short form and two long form hero videos

6 support videos placed nationally on LinkedIn

40 locations across Sydney outdoor, still and video,

34 locations across university campuses in Sydney

Targeting campuses and 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.