Step in a Direction Uniquely Yours
Maynooth University
bigO was tasked with creating a recruitment campaign to coincide with Maynooth University’s new strategic plan, positioning the university as a vital and dynamic place to build students’ futures.
Context
How to make a university irresistible to prospective students? Mix fresh, eye-popping design and warm, trustworthy messaging with reliable insights from young people. Then tie it all together with great creative and crank it up to 11.
bigO’s marketing and creative teams were tasked with delivering a recruitment campaign. This campaign needed to align with the Strategic Plan 2023-2028, which included several high-level goals, among them internationalising the student population, establishing the university’s excellence and enhancing awareness of the impact of its research.
The creative encouraged prospective students to “Step in a Direction Uniquely Yours” and embark on their educational journey with Maynooth.
Video and digital content captured the effervescence and energy of the campus, which combines state-of-the-art facilities with historic 19th-century buildings – a key part of Maynooth’s unique heritage and offering. Morgan Bullock, a talented dancer, international viral TikTok star and Maynooth University student featured alongside others in the vibrant video and photography that led our content.
Rolling out across a series of programmatic, MPU, and banner media, we invited students to visit Maynooth University for their Open Day in November 2023. The campaign also cast the net widely across a variety of traditional and digital media.
The results were immediate and impressive. Throughout the campaign— deemed a “huge success” by the client’s Head of Marketing — we worked closely with the Maynooth University marketing team, admissions office, and other key stakeholders to deliver key messages that resulted in an increase in registrations of nearly 20% from the university’s previous campaign.
The campaign cast the net widely across a variety of traditional and emerging media, ranging from national and local radio advertising to Spotify advertising and podcast placements.
We also used local and national traditional print media placements in English and Irish, which was backed by a strong strong and comprehensive digital advertising campaign through online press, Google ads and social media.
Embarking on their university chapter is a pivotal step in most student’s lives, so to honour this, the narrative we devised was empathetic, sensitive and uplifting. The creative encouraged prospective students to “Step in a Direction Uniquely Yours” and begin their educational journey with Maynooth.
