72 CASE STUDY
marketingmag.com.auMARKETING 2019Background: Every October, RMIT
and 42 other Australian universities
compete for the attention of almost
a quarter of a million teenagers
studying for their fi nal high school
exams. RMIT is a university grounded
in technology, design and innovation,
and has a focus on practical,
hands-on learning. Based in
Melbourne but with a global footprint
of extended campuses, RMIT needed
to reinforce its brand credentials
as a cutting edge university to
an increasingly globally-minded
audience of prospective students.
Primary among those audiences is
school leavers. Like every university,
RMIT is constantly striving to be the
fi rst preference for students fi nishing
high school. Unfortunately, fi nal year
students are a demographic hard
to reach with traditional paid media
and are a target for many brands
from both inside and outside the
education sector.
Objectives: With seemingly little
differentiation between university
offerings, how could RMIT stay top
of mind and reinforce the reasons to
study there?
The task for Naked was to develop
a campaign that would reach school
leavers at the very time they were
making the decisions about their
choice of university – during the
revision window before their fi nal
year exams.
Our solution would be judged
both on brand metrics (reach of
branded communications) and
on engagement metrics (brand
interactions and lead generation).Strategy: Students fi nishing
high school are busier than they
have ever been in their lives, but
they are consuming less media
while focusing more on their study.
Reaching them using traditional
advertising is effectively adding to
the unwanted noise that distracts
them from this study.
We posed the question: could a
university with a vast array of skills
and capabilities on hand fi nd a way
of communicating to students in
a more useful way – one that may
actually help their study? And, in
doing so, could we actually provide
a demonstration of RMIT’s approach
to collaborative, hands-on learning,
instead of just talking about it?Execution: We created the
world’s fi rst typeface specifi cally
designed and proven to help users
remember more... and gave it free to
Year 12 students studying for their
fi nal exams.
Rather than talking at the
audience as traditional broadcast
advertising does, we wanted to
create something that Year 12
students would actually want to
hear about.
While investigating ideas
for study hacks, we discovered
previous research into the concept
of cognitive disfl uency: the
principle whereby creating small
obstructions to learning results in
deeper cognitive processing, and
subsequently better memory traces
are created. This provided the
inspiration for our solution.
Using RMIT’s original motto ‘the
skilled hand and cultivated mind’ as
our guiding principle, we brought
the science of psychology in RMIT’s
Behavioural Business Lab together
with the art of the School of Design.
This team worked together with
Naked to design, refi ne and test an
entirely new font that became Sans
Forgetica – The Font to Remember.The amnesia antidote
Campaign
Sans Forgetica
Client
RMIT
Agency
Naked Communications