Embed an iconic brand into the student lifestyle

Challenge:

Connect with students in an authentic and relevant way to embed the brand.

Background:

An icon of late-night student living, Pro Plus helps students stay awake to meet essay deadlines while maxing out their newfound independence.

The brand's social-first strategy focused on content that might make students laugh, think or study better, rooted in life hacks to help them live ‘Like a Pro’. But we needed to move the brand on from an individual’s choice to making it a part of the student lifestyle and promote the brand benefits. Our research identified that, contrary to the hard-partying stereotype, a growing number of students are staying up late coding, building apps, launching start-ups. It takes energy, time and tenacity to realise great ideas and juggle the demands of student life. This is where Pro Plus comes in.

Solution:

We devised a brand experience to connect with students and generate watchable, shareable social media content.

Inspired by Rube Goldberg machines, which are intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and overly complicated way, we set students a competitive challenge to test their ingenuity and celebrate the qualities of the hard-working student population.

We took the competition to a top university and challenged students to ‘Build like a Pro’. Winners would share an overdraft denting £2,000 cash prize and have the chance to win gift vouchers along the way. We also threw in free pizza.

Timed to coincide with the build up to the busy exam period in May, the organised chaos of our Contraption Challenge event was turned into a multi discipline campaign that ran across social media, university media and student press. Enthusiastic student attendees also went on to produce a stream of unplanned user generated content, amplifying the message with authenticity and further embedding the brand.

Results:

The Pro Plus Contraption Challenge campaign reached 4.2m students (+147% above target) and generated 444k engagements (+134% above target).

Sales figures during the campaign period reveal over 6% uplift on the previous four weeks, and nearly 2% uplift on the same period the previous year. And these figures don’t factor the sales in campus shops.