Campus Ali

Stafford Long wanted to promote their graduate marketing services. The inital request from the new business team was to send out a rather dry email demanding that companies position them at the top of their pitch lists. We thought we could do something far more effective by using our creative noodle so we (me, Eric and Craig) got our thinking caps on. We identified their main point of difference from competitors as having a dedicated resource travelling the country gathering intelligence on university campuses.

To create a more appealing, human and interactive experience for our audience of potential suitors, we decided to introduce and brand him as a character – someone to be the face for this service. The result was ‘Campus Ali’, who on his travels would write a blog that served the purpose of keeping in touch with the target audience and steadily gaining momentum in the market by giving away valuable insights into campus life.

We built the blog using WordPress, Twitter (which Ali uses to text amusing updates that appear in the site header) and a mailing list sign up to capture details of interested parties. We also had fun spray-painting a grunged-out Stafford Long logo onto a tent, doing a photo shoot with Ali over the road around SOAS/Russel Square and shooting a slightly silly video introduction to the character (see first post).

Various media were used to promote the campaign, from targeted HTML emails to a mass postcard mailout. This soft-sell approach has been a great success in generating buzz and some great new business leads. It has also been praised as a valuable resource by existing clients alike who read it to keep up to date with the latest campus marketing thinking.

DM postcard