NMMU TV ad a success

A shot from the NMMU TV advert

It’s official. Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University’s national brand building campaign has been a success.

The campaign launched in April to create awareness of the University on a national level included a television commercial – the first by our nine-year-old institution. View here http://ow.ly/Cq3zr

A great deal of money, time, thought and effort was ploughed into the production and distribution of the “Dreamers to doers” campaign for the university using television, magazine, radio, social media and airport billboard advertising to get the good name of NMMU out into the public domain. All our marketing materials were accompanied by the www.nmmu.ac.za as a means of driving listeners, viewers, airport passengers and readers to our website.

The following chart says it all …

Increased interest in the NMMU website correlates with the launch of the NMMU advert

We went from receiving a maximum of 30 000 visitors to the website daily (in December 2013 as students scurried to find place at university) through to almost 80 000 visitors soon as the TV commercial was launched early in April.

But here are so more statistics to confirm that investing in marketing is a worthwhile financial venture:

• NMMU’s internal newsletter, talk@nmmu, on the website saw its visits goes from 12 128 in October 2013 right up to 77 083 for May this year. 
• Up to 19.5m viewers were exposed to the television advert on the DSTV and SABC 1 and 2 channels
• 2m readers were exposed to the adverts in various inflight and other national magazines
• 15m listened to the dulcet tones of NMMU honorary doctorate John Kani on various national and regional radio stations
• 3.6m passengers may have seen the billboards at airports in Johannesburg, Cape Town, George and Port Elizabeth
• 955 000 impressions were received from our online placements

So while we know that our brand building campaign did create a flurry of interest as measured in the increased foot traffic to our website, the real test will come with an increase in applications from students from outside of our province (as an aside, 70% of NMMU’s 27 000 students come from the Eastern Cape, and the majority of those are from the metro).

That we will only be able to ascertain once Admission have input all the data.

What we can share at this stage, however, is that there has been a sizeable increase in the number of applications to NMMU for 2015.

Hot-off-the-desk of our marketing colleagues comes the news that there is …

• A 7.1% increase in applications as at 1 October to study at NMMU in 2015.

So yes, even at a glance, the university’s brand building campaign has been successful.

From the opening scene of the 30-second advert