From the Nominator

"The Faculty in Focus campaign’s overall aim was to promote the KAUST brand globally. Our specific objectives were to (1) celebrate our faculty, (2) showcase their work on a global stage, and (3) help attract new talent to KAUST.   

We embraced a multi-faceted approach based on video and written interviews shining an authentic light on our professors, their work, motivations, passions, and lives. Over three days, our in-house team interviewed eight professors on and off camera and had on-site photo shoots. Our core content was a series of eight profile videos (and one introduction/trailer video) and a parallel set of eight written profile features with additional web, email, and social media copy/graphics. We created five different formats of each video (45 exports total) to optimize for each social channel and added English and Arabic subtitles for increased accessibility.  

A comprehensive distribution strategy aimed to reach as many people in our target audience as possible. A month-long social media video campaign helped us reach the audiences already following KAUST’s channels and targeted paid advertising expanded the reach further.   

To reach a truly global academic audience, we formed a bespoke brand partnership with Times Higher Education. We leveraged their comms channels with social media ads, taking ad space across their website and emails, and produced an eight-page print supplement for their magazine. 

All content linked back to a custom-built campaign microsite.    

The campaign had a massive impact, exceeded all goals, and had a total campaign reach of 8.46 million."

From the Judges

We all felt that promoting faculty research is a good idea. We are impressed by the campaign's impact and distribution, and how it was able to exceed its goals and reach their target audience. We are also interested in knowing if the campaign was successful in retaining talent and generating job applications.