Campaign Middle East, the world’s leading authority for the advertising, marketing and media industries, recently featured the University of Wollongong’s new marketing campaign that was launched earlier this year.

The career path campaign, the second in a series of campaigns, highlights career paths and its matching degree programs.  The UOWD team used design-thinking methodology to focus not on degrees, but on career paths and the affect its students wanted to have on the world.

“We wanted to use no stock photos, no real people and not alienate any of our 108 nationalities, making this campaign truly international by using icons, infographics and aspirational messaging’, commented Brendan Vyner, Director of the Marketing and Student Recruitment Department and the project leader of the campaign.

“We looked at what other top universities in the UAE and around the world have done and it seemed that most of them shared many marketing conventions that meant none of them really stood out. We felt that UOWD needed to stand out from the crowd and took the opportunity to create something unique”, he added 

UOWD’s inspirations were to be bright, colourful, whilst still adhering to its branding guidelines and using their pantone colours, so that although new and innovative, the campaign would be instantly recognizable as “UOWD”.

The second phase of the campaign focussed on highlighting a hero career path for each degree.  This is an aspirational future for any person opting for one the degrees at UOWD.  The aim was to encourage students to “Choose their Hero”, almost like in a video game or story.  The icons were faceless, without nationality or any defining characteristics, so that students could imagine themselves in these careers.

Next was developing a guide that used the icons from phase 1, to show how they linked to the career paths in phase 2, asking the simple question “Where will your career path take you?”

The campaign was rolled out across all social media channels, bus wrappings, rollup banners, exhibition stands and more.  The goal was to tell a story from phase 1 to phase 2 and show a common branding and visual language across all marketing channels.