Kent is Cool.com

Emma Nevill of the University of Kent approached Media Garden to conceptualise an original way of raising awareness of Kent. They wanted to show potential students all that studying at Kent has to offer as well as promoting Kent as a county.  We agreed that the application had to be fun and interactive to encourage students to engage with Kent.

The Approach

Kent has a lot going for it so our approach was to embrace these elements with a sense of humour and combine this with information about how much more there is to Kent than just castles, historical monuments and famous poets.

Kent is Cool was the ideal name for the campaign – it was slightly tongue in cheek, it was a break from the norm and it was memorable.

Now all we had to do was come up with the creative solution…

 

The Creativity

We decided to pose a challenge to visitors of the site. If they know so much about Kent then let’s challenge that knowledge, let’s challenge their “street cred”

If they do well, a prize will be waiting for them. If they do badly… well, they clearly don’t know as much as they first thought.

So what did we create? We designed a Flash quiz game that asked the visitor a whole host of questions on a variety of subjects. History, popular culture, music, sport, you name it. Each and every question was related to Kent and the University towns.

And who posed these questions? The locals of course! We conceptualized and illustrated various characters from Kent’s past and present just to add a touch of history to the whole game.

Each player of the game is taken around the county to various sites of interest whether they be an historical hotspot, a great place to go out or a nightclub or bar. So as each player answers one of our famous faces’ questions, they pick up little pieces of information along the way and discover that Kent is in fact, a pretty cool place to study.

The game featured a hi-scores table to check your scores, and more importantly a feedback form that asked if the game had changed the players perceptions of the county.

The resulting feedback was encouraging and another game is planned for late 2006.

 

The Reaction

After the game had been launched, an email marketing campaign was used to promote the website to a huge opt-in list of students from the U.K. The uptake was pretty good and the overall reaction to that game was very encouraging.

The response from the University was also very positive as Emma Nevill explains:

“I really enjoyed working on this project and Media Garden were inspirational in their approach.  I knew what I wanted to achieve and they took my ideas and turned them into an award winning design. We are extremely pleased with the results”

 

Media Garden’ Kent is Cool was selected as the Best Education Interactive Application in the 2006 IAC Awards.

 

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