Brief

The famous London educational institution Goldsmiths was undergoing a rebrand. They had just updated their visual identity, and they had a new positioning that aimed to cast the net wider. There are many people, with many interests and dreams, from many different grounds. But for all of them, there’s one Goldsmiths.

Our brief was to create a campaign that would speak to their target audience of school-leavers with a passion for education beyond the traditional. They wanted to advertise the breadth of their courses - not only those normally associated with Goldsmiths, such as art, music and fashion, but also economics, psychology, etc. too - and show that everything they offer is ‘creative.’

Insights

Our research showed that Goldsmiths attracts students who very much consider themselves as ‘individuals.’ Young adults who like to be challenged, and are savvy enough to see through the usual platitudes.

We also looked at their everyday behaviours and identified streaming radio and Spotify as the perfect channels. We know that 16-17-year-olds stream the majority of their music, and look to ‘tastemaker’ stations and influencers to curate the latest tracks.

Relevance

We knew our creative execution needed to provide a confluence of all these elements for it to really land. Further education is more diverse than ever, and if we didn’t capture our audience early, we knew someone else might. So we focused around music and creativity as the primary two passion points for our listeners, and the most important values they share with Goldsmiths.

Solution

You attract creative minds with creative work. So instead of telling people how artistic Goldsmiths is, we’d rather show them… by making each ad an individual work of art.

We utilised dynamic audio serving - traditionally reserved for inserting real-time information such as a listener’s location or the ambient weather into audio ads - to randomise a number of specifically composed musical elements. These included more traditional music stems, such as different analogue drum patterns, pizzicato strings and ambient synth pads, as well as our own original musical inputs recorded by a real Goldsmiths Alumni (an MA in Contemporary Music).

This was a world first. Such a world first in fact, that the technology to ‘randomise’ musical stems and sound effects had to be built for us.

The way it worked was that a particular drum pattern, synth progression, ambience and instrumentation would be curated into a music track, live for each individual listener. This resulted in thousands of unique executions, which meant that it was virtually impossible for anyone to ever hear the exact same ad twice.

The copy told the complementary story of individual perception. How a truth for one person can be seen very differently by another. And how what we see and hear only has to be significant to us for it to have meaning.

Cultural Context

It is estimated that the average person now comes into contact with around 5,000 pieces of advertising a day. For anything to cut through that noise, it has to be personal, tailored and immersive. That equates to relevance for an audience and effectiveness for a brand.

Our innovative use of technology ensured that each listener was given an ad as unique as they are.

It also highlighted the creativity expected from a prospective Goldsmiths student, in any course they should like to undertake.