Birmingham City University

The Brief:

To raise awareness of the University’s Careers Recruitment Fair amongst students through word of mouth.

What is it? – The Careers Recruitment Fair, officially known as ‘Discover Potential – Improve Prospects’, is an event put on annually to support students and graduates of Birmingham City University in starting their careers.

From the BCU Employment Zone website: ‘This is your chance to find out more about the opportunities for work that are out there to help improve your job prospects. Ranging from emploters promoting project baed work, placement and internship opportunities through to full time paid positions and even self-employment opportunities.’

Deliverables – The campaign is to be viral, and should create a buzz via word of mouth. Any media welcome as long as the outcome is a form of guerrilla marketing. The advertisement should both raise awareness and direct students to the Employment Zone website for full details.

Concept

Our experience of students, including ourselves, is that they are lazy, Consequently events such as this on often get cast aside, despite the obvious benefits.

An outcome that demonstrated an honest account of student attitudes, based on our research, was the best way of engaging them and generating interest for the viral ad, and the event itself.

How do you visually portray the student who sacrifices their lie-in to attend the event, yet on arrival is surprised by the guidance and range of opportunities?

We used the saying ‘the early bird catches the worm’. This gave us an excellent vehicle to deliver the message, and more importantly an excuse to dress up in ridiculous costumes.

The best way to get across the narrative was to use a time baed media. In this case, video. The video needed to show the lazy bird staying at home, whilst the other bird goes to the careers fair and benefits from his meeting with the worm.

Main Video:

Bloopers Reel:

Solution

How do you turn the phrase ‘the early bird catches the worm’ into a viral campaign

Main Video -

We generated initial interest through the main video and its creation. The majority of filming was done on campus, using students for the actors. This exposed students to the birds and increased the viral’s relevance. The actors were dressed in large bird and worm costumes to make the campaign more appealing to students, referencing TV shows such as Trigger Happy TV.

Support Video -

Alongside the main video, we decided to release a bloopers reel a few days prior to the fair. This second video featured funny outtakes from the filming of the first video, as well as interviews with the birds regarding the fair. This video was intended to be shorter and funnier, to retain interest in the viral.

Flyering -

The fair was run across three of the Universities campus’, on three consecutive days. The day prior to the fair, at each venue, we handed out flyers in costume to students at each campus to help promote the event. This gave the students a chance to interact with the characters, find out any information they needed and generally raise awareness of the event.

Access -

The videos would be distributed by e-mailing all BCU students to their BCU addresses and creating a Facebook group containing all BCU students, giving a link to the videos on YouTube.

Also, the videos would play on any screens available around each campus, e.g. the Canteen.

I also created some packaging to house a CD containing the two videos and information about the event.