The New School
Finding the veterans who want to study fine art. Four years running.
4
Consecutive years of hitting military enrollment targets
Every year
Targets increased, and were still met
Hyper-niche
Military-affiliated arts and liberal arts applicants
Near-zero
Starting assets for a full creative program
The Challenge
The New School needed to recruit military-affiliated students, veterans, dependents, and active-duty service members, into a progressive liberal arts, fine arts, and performing arts university.
Two problems made that hard. First, the audience is genuinely tiny: military-affiliated prospects specifically seeking arts and liberal arts degrees are a fraction of a fraction. Second, we started with almost no creative assets, a limited budget, and one of the highest visual standards in the world to live up to.
The Approach
We solved the audience problem by refusing to accept the obvious targeting. Rather than broad military recruitment, we built and tested our way into precise segments where military affiliation overlapped with genuine creative and academic intent.
On creative, we worked within tight resource constraints to produce ads that met the standard of a world-leading design institution, because anything that looked off-brand wouldn't have converted this audience anyway.
The Work
- 01Built a targeting approach engineered to surface a needle-in-a-haystack audience
- 02Developed original ad creative from a near-empty asset library, on a limited budget, to the university's visual standard
- 03Continuous testing to isolate the segments and messages that produced real applicants
- 04Ongoing program management against annual enrollment quotas
Results
- Consistently met military-affiliated student targets for four straight years
- Hit those targets even as quotas increased every year
- A proven, repeatable path to an audience most would consider too small to advertise against
- A creative library built from scratch that holds up against the university's own brand standard
Been told your audience is too small to reach?
We found military veterans who wanted fine arts degrees, and we found enough of them to hit a rising target four years in a row. Niche isn't a reason it can't work. It's usually the reason it does.
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