Feed Your Brain

Brief
Quizlet is an educational app that helps students break down complex study material into digital flashcards.

While Quizlet is an essential tool for many students in the US, the UK is still a developing market. So, as students returned to university in September, Quizlet wanted to drive awareness and sign-ups through paid social (on TikTok and YouTube), alongside on-campus digital media.

The campaign creative needed to stand out in busy social feeds and on-campus screens. Since UK students might be hearing about Quizlet for the first time, the value proposition needed to come across – taking complex university subjects and breaking them down into smaller pieces to memorise. Videos had to make sense with sound on (for social) and off (for on-campus screens). All in under 15 seconds.

Idea
Our research showed that for students facing mounting time pressures and a big step up in complexity, a key concern is how to get a vast amount of study material into their heads in a way that sticks. This insight led us to ‘Feed Your Brain’: like preparing food to eat, Quizlet helps students prepare their coursework to make it easily digestible.

The core social campaign creative was 6 surreal stop-motion animations. We were inspired by the TikTok trend showing meals being made in rapid, quick cut videos. But in our world, rather than food prep, we have textbooks and study material being chopped with knives, blended, sliced from a kebab skewer, and rolled out into sushi. The art direction used arresting visuals in Quizlet’s bright colour palette to make sure the spots caught students’ attention. On YouTube and TikTok they were set to a quirky soundtrack, mixing cooking foley with more unusual sounds.

Results
‘Feed Your Brain’ came to life across university campuses and students' feeds, through paid social on YouTube and TikTok, alongside digital out-of-home on 50 university campuses.

The campaign exceeded targets, increasing sign-ups by 19% over forecast. Unaided awareness increased by almost 4%, and usage of the app leapfrogged competitor Duolingo amongst the target audience.