Launching an emotional campaign, centered around the student experience

After working with Student Roost for several years across their website and digital offerings, we know the requirements of their audience from a web perspective. The challenge for this campaign was reaching further, and helping a new audience understand what Student Roost has to offer, beyond selling rooms.

We worked alongside Student Roost to develop the overarching strap line – more than a room. This belief was crucial, not only in helping audiences understand how much more there is to Student Roost than just renting a room in a building, but also to show that student life is rich and diverse in experiences. Life as a student encompasses everything, and Student Roost is the sanctuary in which friendships and memories are made. We wanted to appeal to students who were about to embark on a new, exciting chapter of their lives, with Student Roost becoming a part of that.

We set out to create a visual experience that would connect several student experiences into a cohesive story, so we produced a video that was told through the memories of Amy, exploring her first year at university via the medium of her phone’s camera roll.

From storyboarding, to shooting photography and video simultaneously over the course of two days and post production to a tight deadline, we produced Amy's story for the More than a Room campaign. The story encompassed Amy’s hardest days at uni, to the most memorable experiences with friends throughout her academic year. The video set the tone for the entire campaign.

This element of the ad campaign was by far the largest, but with the biggest pay off, as it has featured on several UK TV streaming services, including itv Hub.

From there, we then identified global and localised messaging that we could capture student’s stories around. We also chose some targeted marketing messages that we needed to tie in to this campaign. We then set the styles for digital marketing, social media and print campaigns. All of the stories used were always centred around the campaign strapline, and were rooted in real life student experiences.

Of course, as Student Roost’s digital partner, we also made sure that the website was fully up to date with the new campaign featuring heavily on the homepage, and with its own dedicated landing page for digital campaigns to link through to.

With the creation of this campaign, came some stylistic changes to the Student Roost brand. We updated the colours to be more vibrant, introducing a revised colour palette that will eventually be rolled out across the Student Roost brand. Typographic style has also been revised, introducing a ‘highlight’ element to help emphasise certain messaging. As well as this, we have introduced framing elements, new illustrations and a more social feel to the photography throughout.

To aid Student Roost with these changes, we created a toolkit that helps guide creative teams to keep consistency and slowly roll out changes internally as well as through the marketing channels.