CURTIN University’s first whole-of-university advertising campaign, launched in 2003, has helped to reverse a slide in the number of potential students choosing Curtin as their first preference.
Gatecrasher Advertising was appointed to position Curtin University as a cutting-edge university.
Gatecrasher developed the branding platform Curtinnovation, which was featured in television and outdoor advertising.
According to Gatecrasher strategic planner Paul Yole, all universities claim to be innovative but no-one owned the brand, ‘innovation’.
“We said that we had an opportunity to own innovation. It’s a platform that every university portrays, but they don’t own it,” Mr Yole said.
‘Curtinnovation’ now a position statement used across all the university’s marketing material.
“We knew going with a word like that [Curtinnovation] would cause debate because it is not a word in the English language and it’s a university stating it. We wanted to get the word out as early as possible,” Mr Yole said.
“We launched outdoor and five-second commercials. We wanted to provoke interest so that people thought: ‘What on earth is this?’
“We then did a series of TV ads. It was a mix of 45- second and 30-second commercials.”
After six months of advertising there was a 73 per cent recognition rate of the Curtinnovation slogan, a 100 per cent increase in the number of year 12 students who regarded Curtin as WA’s most innovative university, and an increase in first preference choices.
