Finding the hero who carries your campaign An account of Cameron Pegg’s Marketing/Admissions presentation at the 2018 International Conference. It can be a person or a coat, an innovation or an idea, but finding your hero is the key to successfully promoting your organisation. CameronPegg,ExecutiveOfficer,Office of the Deputy Vice Chancellor at Griffith University in Queensland, says the hero could be someone or something you didn’t expect. Cameron told delegates at the conference in Auckland, it was essential to be innovative rather than sticking with the safest option. “You need someone to lead the story,” he said, in a presentation titled How to find your Frodo. “You need to think about which hero people are most likely to follow.” Cameron cited a campaign by the Western Sydney University that created a short video telling the story of Deng Adut, a former child soldier who was rescued from Sudan. Deng was brought to Sydney, taught himself to read at 15, attended the university, gained a law degree, and in 2017 was the New South Wales Australian of the Year. The video became part of the university’s rebranding and went viral. It was showered with awards - “it won everything” - and saw a 7% increase year on year in school-leaver university first preferences. “That sort of increase in first preference is stratospheric - everyone wanted to know who Deng was,” Cameron said. “That’s the influence of getting the narrative right - it’s the blood and guts of everything, it’s the stories we tell each other, it’s the stories we tell about ourselves.” But Cameron said your Frodo didn’t need to be a person. For St Catherine’s School in Sydney, the hero of their campaign was a red coat. It was built on a video featuring students wearing the school’s iconic red coat in choreographed routines. The video finished with an aerial shot of students standing in the shape of a heart with other students forming two moving steams running through it. Cameron said the-then Marketing and Communications Manager got the school to allow students at assembly to sharethevideoonFacebookimmediately after it was shown, capturing their enthusiasm. It was also shown in the same week as a cinema advertisement that generated spontaneous applause when it finished screening. “When was the last time an ad about your school generated applause?” he said. The campaign, which also featured still photos of a senior student facing a junior, and another young student wrapping herself in the coat, was “one of the most skilled marketing messages I’ve ever seen”. Cameron said the inconvenient truth was that almost all school and university recruitment images looked the same. “I know that boards often want to steer us away from being too risky but we’ve got to avoid the ‘Same Same Syndrome,’” he said. “Something that looks like it has come from a stock photo library, is not a hero shot.” A University of Melbourne campaign that made the university’s innovation and ingenuity its hero, took a different tack. It turned a series of the city’s tram stops into interactive exhibits. These highlighted the university’s world-changing research. Visitors were encouraged to investigate the innovation first hand on their smart phones via an interactive app. The AIME (Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience) promotional video was different again with the hero this time being a message. It featured two animated wooden characters from different backgrounds meeting and eventually breaking the shackles that kept them on fixed paths. AIME supports Indigenous students to go to university and realise their academic goals. Cameron said the power of the video’s message made him want to know more about the organisation and what it did. “The message in all of this is that you have to pick the right hero,” he said. “And you have to understand and own the narrative. Don’t do something safe and boring.” CHRIS PETERS WRITER CHRISTOPHER T PETERS LTD WWW.CHRISPETERS.CO.NZ 4 3 DECEMBER 2018 4 3