The campaigns you won’t see this week

There were fine speeches made to a Senate Committee last week, but reasoned arguments, announcements of hiring freezes or the NTEU landing on Mr Clare’s doorstep have not deterred Education Minister from pressing ahead with his plan to slash international student enrolments.

Is that because the 26 million + Australians who missed the Senate Committee’s deliberations are still telling Labour and Coalition pollsters that they blame international students for their cost of living ills?

Possibly. I am not privy to polling, but that’s what some have argued. Others in the sector have welcomed the cuts, hoping for a recalibration in favour of institutions that have received fewer international enrolments in the past.

Setting aside the arguments for and against for a moment, let’s suspend belief and imagine that the sector can agree on a position on this. We will assume for the sake of this discussion that the sector decides that caps are, at least in aggregate, a problem. If that was the case, then we would ideally be planning to do more than despatch a few noted speakers to one of Parliament’s lesser-known rooms for a chinwag if we wanted to change public behaviour. We might actually look beyond the fancy scones and LinkedInnable speaking opportunities and set up a campaign to communicate with the world beyond the obvious bubble of power.

The discussion over caps led me wondering what sort of campaign would change the hearts of middle Australia – and put pressure on both major parties to ditch their position on caps (or move the dial on any other policy position).

It has become accepted wisdom without any definitive proof that higher education institutions are on the nose with the public. The past approach have focused on winning them back with saccharine prose. But the reality – and the cut through – is more ‘Grim Reaper’ than ‘Aeroplane Jelly’.

I came up with a genius campaign idea on a Sunday while failing to install a sprinkler system which owed more to a grim reaper-style focus, and released it to the audience at HE FEST.

It was 15 minutes with an AI picture and a quick set of lines – just to give a flavour. A discussion starter, absolutely not a finished ad. Just enough to get some discussions, going and providing a foil to an alternative tagline presented to the conference by Rory McLean, a multi-award winning advertising leader who is Creative Director at Sydney agency Adrian William.

Rory provided the conference with an alternative rationale and tagline that owed more to ‘the business of hope’ as Macquarie’s Professor Eric Knight described higher education. The alternative direction also built on inspiration from University of Western Sydney Vice-Chancellor Professor George Williams, who told the conference it was time to rekindle trust and connection with community by talking about what matters to them, not what matters to us.

After a forensic survey of university marketing campaigns, Rory walked the conference through the opportunity to develop a new campaign to connect the tertiary sector with Australia. Moving beyond the ‘Universities matter’ message, Rory discussed how a change in emphasis to ‘Australians matter’, emphasising the impact of the sector on Australians, could lay a foundation for cut-through, with line’s such as ‘Don’t cap our impact.’

These, then is the campaign that you won’t see this week – but which could make an impact to change hearts and minds in ways that current messages are not.

Rationale for stop stupid

First, the rationale for a new approach to rekindle community support for the HE sector – Stop Stupid. This is just one approach, but it’s useful to discuss the thinking behind it to consider if there are new more focused paths that the sector should consider.

1. What if our sector wasn’t able to deliver the workforce that middle Australia until now have taken for granted? It’s not uni jobs or students that are going to move hearts and minds. It’s when they can’t go to the doctor or get their taxes sorted or fix their toothache that will really activate the voting public. We need to find out what matters to other Australians, not just to us.
2. Australians in marginal seats care most about cost of living (which we aren’t seen to be doing much about) and also a lack of services. The ABC reported in June that access to healthcare is the number one concern in George William’s new constituency, Western Sydney. Not the number of international students, or the future of George’s new institution, Western Sydney U – but whether they can get access to a GP when they need one. Which is why George’s advice to stop talking about ourselves so much seems to add up.
3. The doctors that are needed in the Western Suburbs need to be trained somewhere – which brings us to universities. Now we all know the issues with getting doctors to head to less affluent/ regional posts, and the limitations on placements and controls of the profession on curriculum and the limited rights for international students to train up and stay. We also know that revenue from international students has cross-subsidised all manner of research and training – and that less revenue from international students translates directly to less cross-subsidies. But this is an ad and the people of western Sydney want to avoid death rather than bored to it.
4. What we know is that right now, students are choosing to go elsewhere instead of study in Australia because of visa fees, caps discussions, visa processing times and a general vibe that the welcome mat has been well and truly yanked.
5. That general story only gets interesting to your plumber in western Sydney if it gets local and it gets personal.
6. So all we need is an international student, lets call her Paula, who was going to come to Australia to become a doctor or a nurse, and had relatives living in Bankstown or Campbellfield and probably would have stayed on to work in that area. Or a student engineer called Kevin who was going to study and stay in Glenelg and fix the roads. Or a psychiatrist student called Geraldine who was going to stay with relatives in Carlton. Real students, who send us a selfie and tell us they are off to Canada or the UK or somewhere else cold instead of coming here and fixing our services issues.
7. So we get a pic of Paula and we tell Bankstown that they could have had their GP shortage fixed, except the ALP wouldn’t let them in. Then we get a pic of Kevin and say he’s off to fix roads in Montreal, so you’re still going to be driving on dangerous potholes in Adelaide because the Libs want to cut student numbers even more than labour. I could go on, but I figure you get the picture.
8. I’ve been teaching this stuff since I started media training program at ANU 20 years ago, but it still doesn’t seem to have seeped in. Find something interesting to others and insert your story into it. Identify issues that matter to them and show a solution. Tell your story with personal examples and make sure they are real and verifiable so no one accuses you of fabrication.
9. Finally use language with some cut through. I am thinking something like stop stupid. Current policies are demonstrably weak, universities and TAFEs are full of clever people, policies that diminish the scale of the education sector without evidence-based implementation plans are manifestly deficient. Or Stupid.

I’m not pretending this is a real ad or even a finished concept. I mocked the idea up in PowerPoint after all and the picture is AI. But it is a taste of the campaign that you’re not going to see, but maybe should.

I made one relevant to the electorate / stomping ground of the Shadow Education Minister as well as the Education Minister, just to be bipartisan.

We are going to be exploring these and other ideas in a major session on the second day of HE FEST called “Pitch for Australia” today – examining opportunities for a better sector narrative to rekindle love in middle Australia. We will be tapping into the minds of leading marketers and thought leaders from across the sector and led by one of the finest advertising minds I know, Rory Mclean. George Williams is going to beam in to provide us with insights into his crusade to find new ways to engage and many of Australia’s leading marketers and communicators will see what they can do to move this idea forward.

The result will be better than my 15-minute execution for STOP STUPIDITY. We’ll keep you posted on the outcomes.