How we helped UWA pursue the impossible.

UWA recently underwent a major strategic re-brand to address perceptions that UWA is out-of-touch and not career-relevant.

A new brand campaign was created around the proposition "Pursue Impossible". It was a motivational call-to-action to inspire prospective students to pursue their dreams. The message was the, no matter how impossible your pursuit may be, UWA is the right university to help you achieve your goals.

As well as perception issues, UWA has had to deal with other market forces, including a dramatically changing competitive landscape, including increased marketing and media spending from rival tertiary institutes and increasing brand and recruitment activities from national and global providers.

Equilibrium was engaged to help produce a digital campaign that incorporated the Pursue impossible message and encourage international students to consider UWA as a desired study destination.

Marketing to a global audience

With universities relying on intakes from overseas students, we needed to consider how to get the message seeded globally. Equilibrium designed and implemented a landing site to house the competition that had to meet the challenging demands of engaging a diverse international audience.

Overcoming barriers

Social platforms aren't universal. One immediate issue to be addressed was that some countries prohibit Facebook and YouTube, which were the campaign's main platforms. As a result, our team had to work to integrate all similar international versions of these platforms to ensure accessibility for entrants, no matter where they lived.

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Marketing assets

Working with UWA's creative consultants, we developed a suite of digital banners, EDM templates and video streaming pre-rolls to promote the campaign to a global student audience.

Delivering results

The competition received 225 entries over 82 days, with entries from countries as diverse as the United Kingdom, Brazil, Malaysia, Honduras, Canada, Singapore and of course, Australia.

Motivating users

There is a level of risk common to any user-generated video competitions because it takes considerable work and effort to create an entry video. This can be a big barrier for an audience. However, the proposition was articulated so strongly that the campaign exceeded all expectations in terms of number and quality of entries. Pitch The Course Of The Future is proof that a genuinely motivating idea with a well thought-out reward, marketed on the right platforms and to the right audience, will be successful.

Motivating Users
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Grand prize winner

The Grand Prize winning entry came via Brazil. The judging panel, which included the Vice Chancellor of UWA and the Mayor of Perth, chose Brazilian student, Matheus Saueressig, who pitched a Biofabrication course of the future. His concept combined production engineering and biotechnology to address the future of world food production.