Kiwis doing great things

AMP: Scholarships Campaign

Website + Integrated Marketing Campaign

www.doyourthing.co.nz
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Read about the challenge, solution and result

The Challenge

AMP Scholarships had a strong reputation and had helped hundreds of New Zealanders fullfil their dreams over the past 10 years. But for 2010, AMP wanted to encourage an even more diverse range of people to engage and apply for an AMP Scholarship, and more fully leverage their brand through this key sponsorship vehicle.

AMP have a need to broaden and deepen their customer base, and therefore the scholarship applications were needing to reflect this and target a broader range of regional applicants and a much broader age and interest demographic. The immediate past years entries and winners had been seen as too exclusive and based on elite pursuits, the new campaign was to debunk this and suggest that anything you wanted to do was worthy of AMP’s consideration.

The Solution

DNA's approach was to develop a new creative and communication platform called 'Do your thing' - a campaign about celebrating endevour and diversity by way of engaging a wide range of Kiwis, their experiences and dreams. Central to the solution was a digital 'engine'.

The core creative approach was led by insight in to the appetites, influencers and inspiration points of our target groups. We also saw the signup process as a journey - just as the campaign needed to sustain community engagement over many months. The driver for us was audience engagement and campaign optimisation - we saw clearly that the parents and peers of applicants were going to be significant in getting more applications, as well as the broad unifying call to action of the campaign through do your thing.

The campaign delivery itself had to have a strong local voice - it was colloquial, Kiwi and inclusive. All key messaging validated that anything was possible and everything was in with a chance. PR rolled out examples of applicants and their diversity, and banners identified a spread of people and goals to validate diversity and prompt investigation.

The key mechanism for the programme was DNA's creation of a totally new, interactive way to apply, via doyourthing.co.nz. Applicants could create, edit and share applications, view previous winners for inspiration, get tips and advice on how to make their application even better etc. This portal was also developed to enable the internal AMP judging process to be completed online (previously it was a manual process).

Due to the broad segmentation the campaign activity was viral, outdoor and digital, and each message and placement targetted a youth, parent, community or sports group to engage many people in the crusade to endorse applicants to 'have a go'. The social media leads on all site and campaign propoerties were simple but allowed sharing and built as momentum, volume and time through the entry period progressed.

DNA developed an integrated approach to the media campaign, embracing digital and social media, through the use of adwords, online advertising, Facebook and Twitter (both sharing functionality and media spend), ambient and outdoor media, print advertising and PR.

The Result

The results were impressive - more applications than any previous year (despite the dramatic reduction in media spend) and a whole new flavour of diversity among the applications filed. Staff engagement and Advisor business buy in were other key metrics, both of which spiked dramatically (upward) from previous years.

A new initiative - Public voting was the most dynamic and user led part of the campaign. The degree of traffic and sharing to get voting was incredible. People were lobbying for their favourites via social media feeds and we got voting from 150 countries. All in all a very effective campaign which achieved the goal of the word being spread by people not media.