NEW BALANCE: CHOOSE YOUR MC
Creative workshop
Creative direction
Art direction
Custom photoshoot
Design development
Custom hand lettering
THE CHALLENGE: New Balance needed to reach Australian students through UNiDAYS — but in a way that felt authentic, not corporate.
THE IDEA: The insight was simple: you can tell a lot about a student by the shoes they wear. So instead of one generic campaign, we built four distinct student worlds — Fashionista, Activist, Runner, Sneaker Head. Each persona had their own identity, their own New Balance wardrobe and their own story.
To make it feel authentic we partnered with real students through the Campus Ambassador program — not models, not influencers. People who actually lived these personas. We developed custom hand lettering lockups for each one, keeping them individual but unmistakably part of the same family. The shoot backdrop palettes, the grunge-meets-streetwear aesthetic, the typography — everything was built to feel gritty and real while staying aspirational.
The full campaign rolled out across social, eDMs, OOH campus hubs, and programmatic.
THE RESULT: 35% uplift in online sales. And that's with a discount that was never applied to the campaign.
