The new d'Overbroeck's ad campaign: how it was made

Normally we use this news feed to talk about student stories or College events. This post, though, is a little different: we thought we'd give you an insight into our Sixth Form advertising – by telling you the story of how we came up with our new ad campaign, which we launched earlier this month.


The thinking behind the ads

We wanted a series of adverts that reflected the opinions of students at the College; a campaign that wasn't us talking about ourselves, but us in the eyes of our students. It was to be eyecatching and bold, with a simple message about a distinctive feature of d'Overbroeck's Sixth Form.


Asking our students for help

So the first step was to ask a group of sixth formers to give up a few hours of their Easter holiday and come in for an informal focus group.

These generous students – Charlie, Daisy, Dani, Samuel and Will – gave us a wealth of feedback and ideas. As we talked, certain themes kept coming up. Independence. Balance. Atmosphere. Trust.

We kept coming back to the idea that, at Sixth Form, these students wanted a place that was geared towards them. A place where, as somebody said, 'It's not about what you can do for the school, it's about what the school can do for you.'

This idea seemed to be at the root of many of the qualities that our group liked about d'Overbroeck's.

... And we decided that this should therefore be the focus of our adverts.




Putting the ads together

Before our focus group had dispersed, we'd taken a few photographs of each student. We then paired up some of these with headline quotations taken from the focus group session and fitting in with our overarching theme. In our ears rang the advice of copywriter Roger Holdsworth, whose daughter Annabel studied here a few years ago: no more than 5-10 words for the headline. (Roger has had an illustrious copywriting career working for prestigious advertising agencies such as M&C Saatchi.)

At length (after a fair amount of headscratching, numerous false starts and plenty of ruthless word-pruning) we ended up with our first set of three adverts, featuring Samuel, Dani and Charlie – which are currently on display at a number of poster sites around Oxford, and have also appeared in the Oxford Times.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on the campaign!