Around the world, people are feeling ill-equipped to succeed at their jobs with what they learned in college and are looking to quickly build the skills they need.
A global campaign focused on driving paid learners within our existing audience to find the confidence they’re searching for with world-class, applied learning available on Coursera.
During round 1 of concepting my copywriter and I focused on ways to highlight the exciting new content and promotions that were launching as part of this campaign. We took a more tactical approach to creative because the products on offer were so compelling, and came up with 2 concepts that positioned these new learning options as straight forward solutions to the problems professionals were facing.
This is a concept about helping learners right now. Future-ready, today offers the latest skills and practical solutions that professionals can begin immediately applying on the job.
Success is a growth journey that begins with learning, and learn, grow, succeed provides actionable steps toward gaining the skills that lead to professional growth and make job success a reality.
After reviewing round 1 with our creative director we knew we had to amp up the emotion of the campaign. Our concepts clearly communicated the value of our credentials, but we needed to do more to convince frustrated professionals to invest their time in learning something new.
Learning is a path to your future and each new skill moves you further along that path. Step forward and grow highlights learners who've made meaningful growth in their careers to inspire others to begin their own journey.
Momentum begins with a moment, and this one is yours. With It's your moment goals big and small are attainable, and every moment is yours to seize and begin building momentum towards your future.
Each goal you achieve is a building block for the future you create for yourself. Define your future encourages learners to take the future into their own hands and define it for themselves.
Something we kept coming back to was the sense of agency we wanted our learners to feel over their future. We didn't want to scare or guilt them into upskilling, and we didn't want to make it seem like they were falling behind.
So instead of Coursera speaking at them about the promise of learning, we would take on the voice of a confident learner with the tagline "I can."
This allowed us to follow "I can..." with many different outcomes that could tie back to our content launches and put the learner in the driver's seat.
Through the lens of Coursera's C we see into the lives of learners — real people achieving real goals, big or small.
For consistency across the campaign learners would be placed in the far left third of the C and be shown facing forward, in action, and moving through their day to create a sense of progress and confidence.
We would always put the visual emphasis on 'I can' to drive home the campaign messaging.
As a global integrated campaign my design system needed to support a lot of different content, channels, languages and promotions. I had to make sure the design would work in vertical, landscape and square placements. It needed to work paired with different logos and lockups. It had to look good when static or dynamic. I had to make sure the text styling could support longer headlines and still worked in different languages. And it had to be a simple enough system to templatize and hand off to our production designers.
If the design system was too rigid our campaign would get boring fast, so I came up with a few different variations of the campaign look and feel that still felt like part of the family. For learner stories I could heroically frame the learner's face with "I can." To use full bleed imagery I'd place the learner in an outline C, letting us take in the full scene.
Part of our content strategy on social was to empower learners with real stories and celebrations of people who embodied the spirit of “I can". We would elevate examples of learners making positive change for themselves, their families, communities, and the world at large through their credentials.
We invited learners to share in their own words what their motivations are and what they can now do with their new skills through discussion prompts and UGC videos.
Highly-consistent designs are great for paid ads and landing pages, but user generated content and variety perform better on social media.
Process changes led to production work being reviewed by creative director without the design lead's involvement which hurt campaign cohesion.
Motivational "I can" copy drove consistently higher engagement rates than standard headlines in A/B testing across geographies.
Low-lift IG story prompts drive both participation and new followers with +66% Instagram follower increase compared to baseline.
200% of goal for registrations
80% above baseline for open rate
30% above baseline for click through
200% above baseline for click through
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