Last week, I attended an event held by the Utah Chapter of the AMA where the topic was co-branding. I wanted to share the project I heard about and some of my takeaways.
The presenter was a Utah company called Instructure, who has an educational platform software called Canvas (It’s along the lines of Blackboard but cleaner and easier to use. I used it at the University of Utah). They are only a couple years old but they have over 200 employees and serve over 500 college and high school campuses.
To help create brand awareness and recognition, they are involved in a hot trend right now called M.O.O.C. (Massive Open Online Courses), which are typically developed by a university but are free and open to the public. (https://www.canvas.net/).
To get more people excited about the idea, they researched what they could do to latch on to something in pop culture and came up with the idea to build a course around the zombie apocalypse tv show, The Walking Dead, which is the #1 show on cable right now (16 million viewers for this season’s premier).
AMC was immediately onboard. They went through challenges with a few different schools developing the curriculum until finally settling with UC Irvine. The course is a collaboration of professors from multiple disciplines – Sociology, Physics, Public Health and Math – and takes lessons from the plot of the show including wilderness survival, nutrition, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, infectious diseases, handling stress, etc. (https://www.canvas.net/courses/the-walking-dead).
They announced the program right after labor day and it was a huge PR success, with over 600 stories. They currently have over 60,000 people enrolled in the course.
Takeaways
- Align the interests – The reason that this worked so well is that it was a win-win for all parties involved. AMC got to engage fans of the show and bring in some new ones without having to front any money. The university got name recognition and introduced people to its course offerings. Instructure got more people using their platform and name recognition in this space. No money exchanged hands. When they tried partnering with other schools, they had problems with the school wanting money or the professors they were working with missing deliverables and wanting creative control. They had to work with the right people where everyone bought in and was on board.
- Timing – It’s taken them several months to launch the campaign/course (with all the parties involved and the challenges they encountered), but they were able to time the announcement of the course a few weeks before the new season and take advantage of the anticipation and excitement around the premier. There were even a few news outlets who ran the story early and they had to contact them to have them pull the story down so they could have the timing be perfect.
- Be Brave and Attempt Something Big – When they were first brainstorming the idea, it was more of a joke – like “Wouldn’t it be funny if we did this?” But when they started actually pursuing it, AMC was surprisingly easy to get a hold of and was immediately onboard. The rest of process was not without its challenges but eventually they were able to pull it together and have some great outcomes.