THE CHALLENGE
To attract more qualified leads from busy, fickle Year 11 students, and raise Deakin’s profile for professional research - enhancing its credibility with potential future students. We were asked to to provide 7,000 Year 11 student leads for Deakin’s new marketing automation system.
THE WORK
We knew the best way to gain leads would be to provide an incentive. But we didn’t want to do just any old giveaway.
A famous 60’s study, called the Stanford Marshmallow test, sought to find out exactly how impulsive or restrained young children were, by examining their ability to delay gratification. The test gave children a simple choice - one reward provided immediately or two rewards if they waited for a short period, during which the tester left the room and then returned.
Researchers also found that children who were able to wait longer, and subsequently doubled their reward, tended to have better life outcomes.
No such test had ever been done for Millennials. What an interesting way to provide an incentive, engage our key audience, and also test just how impulsive they are than by repurposing the 60’s experiment while putting Deakin front of mind?
We posed the question, which would you rather have?
$5,000 in cash money granted right NOW, or $10,000 in cold hard cash, deposited directly into your bank account... in 3 years time.
The experiment launched online. Using the competition entry form, key data was captured including location, gender and school year level.
To drive awareness of the competition, we partnered with Pedestrian.TV to get to our target demographic. They created engaging editorial to introduce the competition, which was distributed via their social channels, eDM database and further supplemented with display takeovers for Pedestrian.TV website visitors.
The campaign also allowed Deakin to explore an existing societal conversation, with a new, interesting and brand-ownable spin.
THE RESULTS
The test provided three entry opportunities to progressively profile participants with an initial form, secondary questions and final follow-up via email to qualify their year level. This led to 21,910 total competition entries based on 10,226 unique lead entries - 46% more than the target of 7,000.
Overall, Facebook ads generated 19,723 link clicks to the competition page, plus 2,717 link clicks from Facebook posts on Deakin’s page.
The winner was chosen at random, winning $10,000 in 3 years time. The test showed that Millennials are more patient than we give them credit for; 63.5% chose $10,000 in 3 years as their preferred reward - over 36.5% that chose $5,000 then and there.