Every October, RMIT University and forty-two other Australian universities compete for the attention of teenagers studying for their final high school exams.

RMIT is a university grounded in technology, design and innovation. Based in Melbourne, but with a global footprint of extended campuses, RMIT needed to reinforce its brand credentials as a cutting-edge university to an increasingly globally-minded audience of prospective students. But with seemingly little differentiation between university offerings, how could RMIT stay top-of-mind and reinforce the reasons to study there?

Our task was to develop a campaign that would reach school leavers at the very time they were making the decisions about their choice of university – during the revision window before their final year exams.

Unfortunately, final year students are a demographic that are hard to reach with traditional paid media and are a target for lots of brands from both inside and outside the education sector. Additionally, at this particular time our audience are busier than they have ever been in their lives, but they are consuming less media while they focus more on their study.

Our strategic starting point was the observation that advertising was in effect adding to the noise distracting students from their study. So we posed the question: could a university with a vast array of skills and capabilities on hand communicate to students in a way that might actually help their study? And in doing so, could we overcome our audience’s scepticism of advertising by giving them something they actually want to engage with?

The agency undertook quantitative research to better understand current study habits. The most interesting finding was that most students take written notes, then type up those notes and use the typed notes to revise from. This led us to investigate existing research around study hacks and how people can better remember what they read.

Previous research from the USA had studied how the choice of font could potentially affect the reader’s ability to retain information. This research study was one of several we found that explored the concept of cognitive disfluency: the principle whereby creating small obstructions to learning results in deeper cognitive processing, and subsequently better memory traces are created. This provided the inspiration for our idea.

Introducing Sans Forgetica: the world’s first typeface specifically designed and proven to help you remember more.

We brought together RMIT academics from the fields of design and psychology to work with the agency to design, refine and test a unique new font; then gave it away to students studying for their exams as a download or Chrome browser extension. The ultimate study hack delivered just when students needed it.

More than just an innovation in typefaces, Sans Forgetica is an innovation in how universities can communicate to prospective students and bring their brand to life in a genuinely relevant way.

Sans Forgetica was a groundbreaking success from both a brand and acquisition perspective. By finding a way to be more useful, we delivered a truly memorable result:

Reach

• 700 million earned media impressions

• $7 million earned media value

• 27 million social impressions

• Coverage in 53 countries

Engagement

• 250,000 font downloads (1,111% of target)

• 36,000 Chrome extension users (480% of target)

Response

• 87,088 leads generated (1,935% of target)

• Cost per lead $1.49 (benchmark CPL $58.50)

While the results far surpassed client expectations, the project has also delivered in other ways. RMIT are in discussions with international academics who are eager to study potential clinical applications of Sans Forgetica (such as the treatment of Alzheimer’s and dyslexia), and are now studying how to adapt Sans Forgetica to alphabets such as Mandarin, which is of huge value given the burgeoning Chinese international student market.

Compared to almost any other category, universities are businesses that have access to an incredible array of skills and capabilities to help solve problems. However, the power of these capabilities is rarely harnessed to solve marketing problems because, for most universities, the marketing function is an administrative corporate department, separated from the main academic capability. RMIT is structured this way and as a result their marketing had previously never brought to life the true potential of the university.

Sans Forgetica flipped that convention on its head. Starting with a marketing challenge, the agency identified a real-world problem to solve, developed the concept to solve it, and then convinced the client to use the resources available within the university to help deliver it.

The project was an advertising brief that led to an academic research project, that led to the launch of a world-first product, that answered the original advertising brief.