THE BRIEF

To drive enrolment by focusing on KAUST’s incredible fully funded scholarship. Supported by the chance to study at their state-of-the-art campus with world-class facilities and teaching, all set in the Middle East.

STRATEGY

We created the campaign headline “We Fund Your Future” to hero their heavy investment in fully funded scholarships, facilities and teaching.

The line has impact because it overtly benefits prospective students. It turns heads as finance is highly emotional and important to them. Feeling financially supported allows them to focus purely on their research goals.

Visually we researched trends, so the work felt current and had standout. For the ads we designed the headline to weave around the students in each scenario, suggesting that KAUST has an integral role in helping the students create a better future.

Alongside the campaign creative, we also designed and developed several landing pages so that we could split test performance.

In addition to our global self-serve campaigns across Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn we have also had success with country-specific platforms such as VK (social) and Yandex (search) in Russia which was a key market for KAUST.

Programmatic and re-targeting play a key role in the channel mix for student recruitment, so we work with partners that are constantly looking for new and innovative ways to engage with audiences. It can be difficult to push USPs through Display, so Chatbot was used as an educational tool to enable deeper engagement on life on campus and the scholarships KAUST offer.

WHY IT WORKS

Research on markets was continuous throughout the campaign, enabling constant optimisation for each audience, through country-specific platforms and local language ads.

RESULTS

With three months to go left on the campaign, we exceeded our stretched US lead target and also hit targets in Europe and Latin.

Applications from the digital campaign are up 100% year on year resulting in KAUST close applications early again in 2022.