Engaging Super Grads
Issue 22 | March 2012
Agency
BMF
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director: Dylan Taylor; Creative Director: Shane Bradnick
Production Team
Alex MacArthur, John Van Der Loo
Other Credits
Simon Starr
Date
September 2011
Background
BMF set out to hire the cream of the crop from the Advertising Federation of Australia’s graduate class of 2011. So they aimed to engage them earlier than any other agency. They wanted to let the students know exactly who BMF are and what they do, and to challenge them to see what they can do for them.
Idea
1. They interacted with the future grad finalists by sending them all plaques in the mail. These plaques included a brief description about BMF and info on where they needed to visit and what they should upload.
2. After scanning the QR code on the plaque, they were sent to the “In Case of Future” site (http://future.bmf.com.au/grads). Grads checked out the content on the site, which gave them some BMF future-thinking inspiration.
3. When they’d had their fill, the future grads clicked through to a blog (http://bmfgrads.com.au/) where they had to upload their own future-thinking piece.
4. Once the students uploaded something, BMF were able to go through their posts and see what sort of stuff the class of 2011 was made of.
5. By the time the selection day rolled around, the agency had already done their pre-flight checks and knew exactly who they wanted to talk to on the day. It gave them an advantage over the other agencies and also put them in the grads’ considerations set.
Results
BMF got themselves the pick of the bunch, the 5 super-grads, who most impressed the agency with their future-thinking submissions and their performances on the final selection day. There were 269 unique visits to the site. Average time spent there was 3 mins 51 sec. 35 Sydney Plaques were sent, 24 Posts on the blog were uploaded, a response rate 69%.
Our Thoughts
Interesting people are people who are interested. So BMF set out to find grads who were interested in media, in communications, heck – who were interested in life.
The average dwell-time on the website was nearly four minutes. I spent way more than that looking at all the stuff the bright young things posted up.
What’s clever about this sort of online application, is the whole agency (if it’s interested) gets to see who’s hoping to join them. Also people like me get to see that there are some interesting people bringing new vitality to adland.
Mind you, a disproportionately large number of the posts seem to be from people who got sent their plaques after the Selection Day.