Feed Your Brain

Challenge
Quizlet is an educational app that helps students break down complex study material into digital flashcards. They wanted to drive student awareness and sign-ups in the UK with a paid social (TikTok and YouTube) and on-campus digital media campaign.

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

Idea
Our research showed a key concern for students 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 creative was 6 surreal stop-motion animations using pixilated hand models. We were inspired by the TikTok trend showing meals being made in rapid, quick-cut videos. Except in our world we have textbooks and study material being chopped, 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 social they were set to a quirky and surprising soundtrack, mixing cooking foley with unusual sounds.

The six ideas created fun challenges for the animators to shoot in-camera. Each animation was shot to work in 9:16 and 16:9 aspect ratios, which was a consideration during the set designs in pre-production. All six videos were shot in a studio over five days followed by several weeks in post-production, including adding flashcard and phone UI artwork in post to allow for future localisation.

Results
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.