Quizlet is an educational app that helps students break down complex study material into digital flashcards. We needed to raise awareness and sign ups among busy UK students.

We created a campaign that would fit into their feeds and on-campus environments, and then stand out for all the right reasons - intriguing, useful, strange and eye-catching.

The campaign exceeded targets, increased awareness and sign ups, and usage jumped ahead of their competitor amongst the target audience.

While Quizlet is an essential tool for many students in the US, the UK is still a developing market. So as students returned to university in September, Flying Object were tasked with driving awareness and sign-ups, through paid social and on-campus digital media.

The creative needed to stand out in busy social feeds and on campus. Since students might be hearing about Quizlet for the first time, the value proposition needed to come across – taking complex university subjects and breaking them down into smaller pieces to memorise. Videos had to make sense with sound on and off. All in under 15 seconds.

Our research showed that for students facing mounting time pressures, and a big step up in complexity, a key concern is how to get material into their heads in a way that sticks.

This insight led us to ‘Feed Your Brain’: like preparing food to eat, Quizlet helps students prepare their coursework to make it easily digestible.

The core creative was 6 surreal stop-motion animations using pixilation. We were inspired by the TikTok trend showing meals being made in rapid, quick cut videos. But in our world, rather than food prep, we have textbooks and study material being chopped with knives, blended, sliced from a kebab skewer, and rolled out into sushi.

For UK university campuses, we created posters, coffee cups, and branded popcorn with bespoke Quizlet sets to complete in the time it takes to cook the popcorn. Popcorn was sent out to Tiktok influencers to complete the popcorn challenge.

We followed these up with an additional 6 videos which developed the idea further with more cookery techniques and academic subjects.

Feed Your Brain came to life across university campuses and in students' feeds, through paid social on YouTube and TikTok, and digital out-of-home posters on 50 university campuses.

The campaign exceeded targets, increasing sign-ups by 19% over forecast. Unaided awareness increased by almost 4%, and usage of the app leapfrogged competitor Duolingo amongst the target audience.