Challenge
Open days are a an important opportunity for the university to showcase everything it has to offer potential students and convert initial interest into a strong desire to study in Southampton. The university’s campaigns team requested our support to deliver the initial advertising of the open day events which would encourage prospective students to book a place on an upcoming open day. The existing campaign style needed to be freshened up to appeal to the university’s undergraduate audience in traditional print advertising as well as digital display advertising and across social media. Upon delivery of the initial advertising, it was apparent that there would then be a range of deliverables for each actual open day which we’d also be required to support with.
Process
Having worked extensively with the university’s existing undergraduate campaign guidelines, we were approaching the project with a strong sense of what had been delivered historically and where we could extend the campaign while ensuring continuity was retained with previous communications. A fresh batch of (still and moving) student photography offered more scope to explore different executions (especially in the video formats required for social media). Using the moving imagery of the students, carefully cut out from backgrounds, allowed us to achieve interaction with the layered angular shapes, patterns and boxed out text content to create a vibrant and youthful advertising style. This gave the advertising a more dynamic feel compared to the previous advertising which utilised still photography and relied on the movement coming solely from the layered elements.
With the initial broad university advertising delivered, we were then tasked with the creation of an extensive list of on-the-day event deliverables. Some of these were programme specific while others were university-wide which meant liaison with a broad range of university colleagues. We needed to apply the open day styling to items including:
- – event programmes (given out to every attendee)
- – lanyard inserts
- – module leaflets
- – plasma screens
- – banner stands
- – flags
- – hanging banners
- – exhibition stands
- – talk timetables
Open Day Subject Hub Banner Stands Outcome
With myriad executions delivered for the July open days, the university’s campaign and events teams were delighted with the advertising and event collateral that we produced. With September and October open days on the horizon, we’ve subsequently been commissioned to undertake a number of repeat executions for these events as well as some new advertising and collateral requirements.