Cannes Lions
CPB, Sao Paulo / UNICESUMAR / 2021
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Background
Pandemic in Brazil. Millions of people lost their jobs. As a consequence, Brazilians’ buying power diminishes drastically. There’s only one thing Brazilians can’t buy that can actually make a difference for the country’s future: education. The Union of Higher Education Establishment Entities in the State of São Paulo expects more than 3 million college students to withdraw from their studies in 2020 alone. Unicesumar’s brief was to come up with a solution to increase students’ buying power and keep them at school.
Idea
More than 3 million students are expected to drop out of college in 2020. They all have one thing in common: a student ID card. They are leaving their courses, but they are holding on to their student cards. To help them continue their studies, Unicesumar – Brazil’s fourth largest university – now accepts student ID cards as payment. Unicesumar created a digital payment system that tracks information on student cards - photo, name and registration number - and cross-checks that information against an official student database, in order to authorize access to courses according to the student’s area of study. This turns a student ID card into digital money.
Strategy
According to the Union of Higher Education Establishment Entities in the State of São Paulo, more than 3 million college students were expected to drop out of college in 2020 alone. This could widen even further the social gap in Brazil, already the seventh most unequal country in the world. These low-income students were now the target of Unicesumar, which created a campaign to help keep them at school. So, we decided to speak their language and accept their student ID cards as digital payment.
Execution
In order to accept all student ID cards in Brazil, we used Google’s Vision AI and trained AI to recognize their name, photo and registration number, as well as the logo and name of the college where they studied. This information was then cross-checked against the official student database stored at Brazil’s State Department’s official website. This enabled us to know when exactly a student left their studies and offer them a range of courses accordingly, to help keep them at school. A total of 2,608 education institutions and 8.6 million names were registered. All students holding a valid student ID card were tracked so that they could continue their studies even after dropping out of college during the pandemic.
Outcome
Unicesumar reached 140,162 new students registered, an all-time high. More than 10 million hours were spent on the platform. After the campaign launched, many other institutions started offering tuition breaks out of fear they would lose their students to Unicesumar. In other words, the campaign changed an industry behavior, opening a window of opportunities for students.
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