The campaign will be at the centre of TEDI‑London’s marketing and will build throughout 2022. TEDI‑London wants to double its intake each year, as part of a 5-year plan for growth.

Tempting students and persuading parents

The main challenge for TEDI‑London is its newness. They have no success stories of past alumni. No heritage or traditions like their redbrick competitors. No employability stats to share. And no impressive university rankings.

We needed to tempt students to choose TEDI‑London and persuade their parents and teachers to support that choice.

We decided to make TEDI‑London’s newness its biggest selling point, to attract the kind of students prepared to take a leap of faith. We needed to attract quirky, adventurous applicants with a pioneering spirit – ambitious enough to join TEDI‑London and to become the future engineers our society needs.

Attracting diversity of thought

Diversity had a role to play too. Not as a box-ticking exercise, but because people design for people like themselves. TEDI‑London wanted to see a strong female presence among its students, as well welcoming people from all backgrounds.

To encourage this diversity of thought, TEDI‑London runs an assessment centre for applicants. That means – unlike most engineering degrees – advanced maths or physics aren’t a prerequisite. Instead, anyone with a good standard of basic numeracy can reach the standard they need to succeed as an engineer.

Building trust

To build trust, TEDI‑London had to make the most of the experience it does have. The three founding partners all have an exceptional pedigree for engineering degrees: Arizona State University, King’s College London, and UNSW Sydney. This and other markers of quality – like the educators on the team – play an important part in TEDI‑London's brand messaging.

Imagining our future engineers

We knew that TEDI‑London students all want to make the world a better place. And that a career in engineering provides an opportunity to solve society’s biggest challenges and make a real difference to people’s lives.

We began to imagine what the new cohort of students might achieve over the next 50 years. After a multi-disciplinary engineering degree at TEDI‑London, how might graduates go on to shape society?

Telling our fictional alumni stories

We needed to fire the imaginations of TEDI‑London’s future engineers. To get them thinking about their contributions to the world over the next 10, 20 or even 50 years.

We scripted three films to tell the stories of three fictional TEDI‑London students: Ali, Grace, and Maria. We explored their lives through ‘before and after’ films, with the students telling their own stories from the beginnings at TEDI‑London and then looking back 50 years later.

In our vision of the future, each one has forged a successful career in engineering. They have solved real-world problems in environmental sustainability, robotics, and smart cities. These stories explore some of the subjects taught at TEDI‑London, to show how students learn to tackle global problems.

Casting our future engineers

For the concept to work, they had to be believable as the same characters. We were lucky to find our six time-leap doppelgangers:

• Emily A Windham and Janet Amsden as future Nobel prize-winner Maria Hoffenheimer.
• Sahan Hiddal and Shekhar Varma to play our robotics specialist Ali Patel.
• Gloria Akinfe and Marsha Millar as smart cities pioneer Grace Alibe.

Shooting into the future

Once we’d found our cast, we co-directed the scripts with the education video specialists at Uni Shoots. We shot our ‘undergraduate’ actors on location at TEDI‑London’s state of the art campus at Canada Water. They talk about their aspirations and show us what life is like for students at TEDI‑London, with its collaborative teaching methods and focus on real-life projects.

Then we needed to imagine our future world, without a Hollywood-scale special effects budget. Our veteran actors told the story of their ground-breaking work as future engineers. We filmed these segments documentary-style, against a plain black background. Then we cut this together with some carefully chosen stock footage.

Portraits of our future engineers

We also photographed each of our actors in close-up, to create headline images for the campaign. With some clever styling and careful Photoshopping, our time-hop twins were combined for some arresting split-screen portraits.

Rolling out the campaign

With the footage in the can, IE and Uni Shoots set to work editing the final videos as 3-minute films. We also created shorter, 30-second teasers for use on social media.

Meanwhile, the team created a suite of display ads and social media assets. We based these on TEDI‑London’s vibrant visual identity in black and yellow.

We targeted the campaign messaging to two different student audiences:

• Students who already know that engineering is for them.
• Students who have the potential but aren’t yet set on studying engineering.

We also mapped the main drivers, calls to action and campaign messaging for teachers, parents, and secondary school students.

Lastly, we prepared a press release to launch the campaign to the specialist education media.

The campaign launched before Christmas 2021, with the bulk of the work completed in just 4 weeks.

Building on the campaign, we prepared a messaging matrix for the institute. This outlines TEDI‑London’s core beliefs, brand personality, and updated strapline and proposition.

We also updated TEDI‑London’s marketing collateral based on the campaign visuals and messaging. These included a prospectus, international students guide, and UCAS stand artwork. We also created Instagram templates, event ads, flyers, and digital assets.