From the Nominator

"The University of Edinburgh offers 80 fully-online masters degrees, attracting students from all over the world. Our marketing campaigns focus on promoting our vast suite of online programmes, as well as the numerous benefits of learning virtually with us.   

Every year, our online learning marketing team produces a major digital paid advertising campaign. Our ads appear on Google search and display, higher education websites, and social media platforms. We work with advertising agency SpiritMedia to strategically place our digital ads based on their expertise.   

While we have placed our ads on Instagram previously, in early 2022, we realized that short-form videos were very popular with audiences, so we worked with SpiritMedia to place our ads within the Instagram Reels space. We were advised to go for a more “Instagram-native” look and feel for the videos, rather than a branded, corporate feel.   

We published five Instagram ads, the highest-performing video being one which capitalized on a “question/answer” trend with certain hand movements which was viral at the time. We used the trend to address three questions about doing an online masters.   

The ad showed brilliant results compared to the previous year's Instagram campaign—higher click-through rate (1.4% vs. 0.5%), lower cost-per-click (£0.25 vs. £0.59), lower bounce rate (37% vs. 52%), higher average session duration (01:49 vs. 01:29). SpiritMedia commented that "the creative had more general appeal compared to last year," and that the ad was driving "very strong quality traffic, significantly more cost effective at driving quality sessions.""

From the Judges

In a world with so much media, short is good! This seconds-long, low-production video produced measurable and impactful results. They knew their intended audience and pounced on an Instagram/TikTok trend in order to attract and educate prospective students about their program.