7 December, 2021

This Is Not A Brand Campaign: SAE Partners With Town Creative & Branding To Champion Its Creators

By B&T Magazine

As Australia’s largest creative educational specialist, SAE Creative Media Institute (SAE) knew its brand campaign would come under intense industry scrutiny.

Partnering with Brisbane-based Town Creative & Branding, SAE elected to take its new All for Creators brand campaign to heart, training the spotlight on the talent, skills, and expertise of its own.

The bold new national campaign was filmed at the SAE Brisbane campus using SAE faculty, students, and facilities and made an instant splash when it launched across digital, social, and out-of-home in late October.

All for Creators highlights SAE’s educational disciplines of animation, audio, creative industries, design, film, games, and music by presenting seemingly ordinary objects such as a bar stool, a burger, or a cat against a plain backdrop.

Across a series of video and print assets, the campaign states the object is not what it seems and demonstrates how students use cutting-edge techniques and industry-leading support to transform the ordinary into something truly creative.

Each advertisement prompts the audience to “See For Yourself” and self-identify as a creative while also providing meaning and evidence to SAE’s brand promise, experience, and benefit above and beyond equipment and classrooms.

Town Creative & Branding director, Chelsea Stevenson, says the brand campaign speaks directly and authentically to the creator.

“We recognise that creators see the world differently and our strategy needs to embrace that.

“We want to show an authentic side to SAE and show real students doing real work and applying their knowledge and skills.

“SAE is home to great students and a faculty of industry professionals so why not use them?” Stevenson says, adding all but three of the more-than-50 talent featured in the campaign were SAE students and faculty.

SAE’s director of marketing, Belinda McCubbin, says the tertiary education category is saturated with testimonial marketing campaigns but partnering with Town Creative & Branding positioned SAE to tell its story in a uniquely creative way.

“We saw this as our opportunity to be bold, to be truly creative and to step into our rightful position as category leaders.

“Like most organisations and institutes, we don’t embark on major brand work often, so when we do we need to invest the time and do it properly to really disrupt the market.

“We knew the brand campaign needed to be technically and academically sound as well as creative, so incorporated our academic faculty throughout the concept development phase to provide feedback, assist with tactical execution and endorse our approach” McCubbin says.

Stevenson says while immediacy and reactivity drive their respective industries, the early success of SAE’s All for Creators campaign stems from the time invested in its development.

“It’s very rare to work with a client prepared to spend the time to go back to the roots of their brand, pull those layers apart, investigate what they stand for and re-craft their brand from the ground up,” she says.

“We have a wonderful partnership with SAE and our resulting campaign is already resonating with and engaging current and potential students and industry professionals.”

All for Creators is the first major campaign for SAE since it appointed Town Creative & Branding its advertising agency in March 2020 and it will remain in-market with fresh assets and new storytelling opportunities until February 2021.

SAE celebrates its 45th anniversary in Australia in 2021 and is the nation’s leading creative media education provider with more than 3000 students at campuses in Brisbane, Byron Bay, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.

Campaign Credits
Advertising agency: Town Creative & Branding
Client services director: Chelsea Stevenson
Campaign creative director: Shay Devery
Production: Eric, Tom & Bruce
Campaign director: Mick Soiza
Post-production: Chop Shop Post

SAE Creative Media Institute
Director of marketing: Belinda McCubbin
Senior manager of national marketing: Melissa Sealey
Campaign specialist: Kelly Garrard

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