Island School wins ESF marketing competition

Winning team with Head of Business Studies Ben Pawlyn

The Annual ESF interschool Marketing Competition, held at RCHL on 16th March 2016 and sponsored by UBER, brought together 14 highly competitive teams from across the ESF schools. In a day of collaboration, authentic learning and communication an Island School team were named the winners.

Each team was given three challenges; create a campaign to recruit new female drivers, create a 60 second video to promote Uber among university students and design a seven day Instagram campaign to encourage brand awareness.

From the winning team Patrick McGillivray said; “We tried to cover everything in the brief and be realistic and consider our target audience very specifically.” “We thought that the main problem might be getting female drivers to start with Uber so we considered and promoted the incentives for becoming an Uber driver.”
“The second task was a 60 second advertisement, so we created different scenarios for the different types of cars they [Uber] offer.”

Team mate Nick Basford said: “We used funny, rhyming audio with the video.” “For the Instagram account we considered ‘sharing’ over a week so we focused on sharing within the Uber community and drivers sharing their photos of their cars and experiences.”

“The competition was really fun and Uber is a really cool company. The presentation from the Head of Uber was very interesting because I didn’t know that much about the company but it is a cool company to use for this competition.”

The team mates explained what it was like to work as a team and what this competition means for their future.
Nick; “The competition was challenging because there was only 45 minutes to an hour to do each task.”
Patrick; “But at the same time it was still fun. We had to come up with ideas as quickly as possible and we had to divide out the tasks to try and be efficient.”

Nick; “I think I am applying to do business at university and I will be using this in my personal statement.”
Patrick; “It is definitely a good experience to see what working with a client is like and it is more realistic then working in the classroom.”

The winning team
Tiff Tong, Thomas Biek, Patrick So, Patrick McGillivray, Nick Basford, Daniel Ziengs

“The school enjoys stable, visionary and thoughtful leadership, a faculty and staff dedicated to the well-being and learning of their students, students who are proud of their school and eager to attend it and strong governance provided through the ESF and the School Council.”
COUNCIL OF INTERNATIONAL SCHOOLS REPORT 2016.