The Australian higher education sector has become one of the most competitive and commoditised categories in the country.
Universities increasingly promote near-identical propositions such as “world-class facilities”, “industry-ready graduates”, “global rankings”, leaving prospective students to navigate a sea of sameness.
In this environment, brand power and mental availability often outweigh genuine differentiation. Established, research-intensive universities benefit from legacy reputation, while mid-tier institutions must work harder to establish relevance at an individual level.
For Australian Catholic University (ACU), this challenge was compounded by structural complexity. Operating across a multi-campus network spanning the east coast, ACU must engage diverse audiences across NSW, Victoria, Queensland and the ACT each with different motivations, cultural contexts and decision drivers.
Simultaneously, ACU holds a distinctive, values-led positioning within the market. While this is viewed as a strength, it is a proposition that requires careful messaging to resonate with modern, career-focused students.
Open Day represents a critical inflection point in the student recruitment cycle. However, traditional approaches which are reliant on short bursts of broad-reach media and generic messaging are no longer sufficient. Prospective students now research privately, across multiple digital touchpoints, often delaying or obscuring signals of intent until late in the decision journey.
Without building relevance early in the student discovery journey, ACU risked under-leveraging Open Day as a conversion moment, ultimately impacting enrolment numbers and long-term brand health.
Objectives
Bench Media was tasked with reimagining ACU’s Open Day strategy to reflect the decision-making behaviour of modern-day students.
The core challenge:
- Build meaningful consideration earlier in the decision-making journey, before intent becomes visible.
- Convert that consideration efficiently into Open Day registrations at scale.
Success of the campaign would be measured against a mix of performance and brand metrics, including:
- Total Open Day registrations
- Conversion rates across Search and Social channels
- Incremental lift driven by upper-funnel media
- Improvements in brand awareness, ad recall and action intent
To these objectives there is a further layer of complexity, in that tertiary education decisions are rarely made by students alone as parents and guardians play a significant role, effectively creating dual decision-making journeys that require specific messaging and media strategies.
Strategy
Bench Media’s strategy was built on the central insight that influence in the education category is not linear, or singular.
Students and parents consume different media, respond to different triggers, and move at different speeds yet ultimately unite on a shared decision.
To address this, Bench Media designed a fully connected omnichannel ecosystem that could engage both audiences, with nuanced messaging, in parallel, while maintaining a cohesive brand narrative across every touchpoint.
Upper-funnel channels were utilised to build mental availability and emotional resonance at scale. This included Out-of-Home, programmatic digital out-of-home (DOOH), cinema, radio and digital audio across key states and territories. These channels ensured ACU maintained a consistent, high-impact presence in both the real world and broadcast environments.
High-attention video environments deepened engagement via premium, unskippable placements across BVOD, instream video, YouTube and gaming environments allowed ACU’s brand story to land with greater impact. This was reinforced by a youth-focused content partnership, delivering editorial and social storytelling designed to resonate more authentically with prospective students.
Crucially, the campaign was not structured as a traditional funnel, but as a connected system.
Behavioural signals, such as increases in category-relevant search activity, were used to identify emerging intent. Audiences demonstrating these signals were transitioned into lower-funnel environments, where Search and Social were treated as conversion layers rather than primary demand drivers.
Creative was localised to reduce friction at the final stage. Prospective students were served location-specific messaging aligned to their nearest campus and relevant Open Day date, ensuring clarity at the point of decision.
The final result was an ecosystem in which each channel was designed to make the next channel more effective, shifting media from a series of isolated tactics into a coordinated, data-informed system.
Execution
The campaign was executed as a full-funnel, multi-channel rollout in the lead-up to ACU’s 2025 Open Day program.
Upper-funnel activity ran across Out-of-Home, programmatic DOOH, cinema, radio and digital audio markets in NSW, Victoria, Queensland and the ACT, ensuring broad geographic coverage and consistent brand visibility.
This was supported by sustained investment in premium video environments, including BVOD, YouTube, instream video and gaming platforms, where attention and completion rates are significantly higher than standard digital formats.
As audiences moved through the journey, real-time behavioural data informed dynamic retargeting across Search and Social platforms. Rather than treating these channels as standalone tactics, they were activated as downstream conversion mechanisms capturing demand already generated upstream.
Creative execution was tightly integrated across channels, with messaging tailored to audience mindset and stage of consideration. Location-based personalisation ensured that each user interaction reinforced relevance, particularly as Open Day dates approached.
The campaign ran continuously across the pre-Open Day window, allowing sufficient time to build awareness, nurture consideration and convert intent, rather than relying on short-term bursts of activity.
Results
The campaign delivered strong performance against both acquisition and brand objectives, demonstrating the effectiveness of a connected omnichannel approach.
ACU achieved more than 14,000 Open Day registrations, reflecting strong early interest and engagement from prospective students. This engagement helped drive a significant year-on-year increase in domestic Semester 1 applications, despite heightened competition across the sector.
At a channel level, the data reinforced the importance of full-funnel integration:
- Users exposed to the full upper-funnel ecosystem (audio, BVOD, video and display) converted via Google Search at 1.69%, compared to 0.44% for those exposed only to Paid Search — a 285% uplift in conversion rate.
- A similar pattern was observed on Social platforms, where conversion rates reached 0.81% for users exposed to awareness activity, versus 0.10% for Meta-only audiences — a 683% increase in efficiency.
A Conversion Lift Study via The Trade Desk confirmed a 442.30% incremental lift, directly attributable to upper-funnel media. This demonstrated that a significant proportion of conversions would not have occurred without the integrated omnichannel approach.
Brand impact was also substantial:
- A Meta Brand Lift study recorded a 12.1-point increase in ad recall and a 12.5-point increase in brand awareness, both exceeding APAC and global education benchmarks.
- Action intent rose by 7.7 points, indicating that brand gains translated into behavioural readiness.
- A Lucid study across digital audio and video channels showed a 5.3% uplift in awareness among parents aged 35–44 after just a single exposure — a critical influencer segment in the decision-making process.
Bench said ACU’s Open Day 2025 campaign demonstrated a clear shift in how effectiveness is achieved in complex, consideration-heavy categories.
Rather than asking which channel performs best, the campaign reframed the challenge by concentrating on which channels work better together?
By treating media as a connected system that builds demand, identifies intent and captures it efficiently, Bench Media was able to transform ACU’s Open Day from a short-term activation into a sustained, high-performing conversion activity.
In a category where differentiation is difficult and decisions are rarely linear, the results highlight that marketing growth no longer comes from isolated optimisation, but from orchestration.
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