The No-Fly Fair

Background

Vietnam is a high priority market for high school and university recruiters. Every fall and spring institutions send reps to Vietnam to meet with students and their parents. The student recruiting industry in Vietnam has grown exponentially since 2008, with tens of thousands of Vietnamese students choosing to study in foreign countries each year. Recruitment fairs are one of the most important and traditional tools that schools use to connect with these prospective students.

Problem 

When the COVID-19 pandemic upended global business, the student recruitment industry was one of the hardest hit. Recruitment fairs were cancelled in all of the major markets, including Vietnam. Flights were grounded and travel was impossible. This created a situation where recruiters were stripped of one of their most effective means of reaching students. Students who were essential to the financial health of hundreds of schools.

Approach

In the fall of 2020 recruiters were busy trying to find online alternatives to in-person events, and “virtual fairs” began to pop up. The platforms varied but the concept was the same: host an online event at a set date and time, take pre-registrations, and let students speak with recruiters via video conference. 

Our view was that virtual fairs didn’t take full advantage of the digital tools available, and so Fourdozen worked with a group of U.S. universities to create an entirely new approach to online recruitment. Rather than try to fit the square peg of in-person recruitment fairs into the round hole of the online world (and perhaps end up with few attendees), we worked with our partners to design a two-week social media marketing blitz, coupled with a lead generation campaign, and a heavy livestream component. This leveraged the benefits of social media as a broadcast medium and gave both recruiters and students more flexible scheduling options for their conversations. It also provided additional metrics to measure ROI.

We generated interest in the events by producing a series of videos modeled on a well-known YouTube humor channel popular among teens in Vietnam, the 1977 VLOG. With black and white photography, as well as throwback casting and costumes, these videos are a hilarious mashup of traditional and rural Vietnamese tropes with a biting modern sensibility. 

Imitation is the highest form of flattery, and Fourdozen paid homage to these original video productions are own takes that were intentionally (even overtly) referential. Traveling to two different rural locations on the outskirts of Hanoi, we filmed six unique advertisements for Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. The ads reached tens of thousands of students, and resulted in hundreds of registrations for our partners to follow up with.