An avocado, an avatar, and a smarter way to reach school leavers

Millennials spot native advertising from miles away, so the tool had to be relevant and authentic, driven by data and creativity at once. A joint workshop in Brisbane with the TAFE Queensland team dug into who their prospective students really are, surfacing two big insights: user-generated content and Stories, the platform where a personalised experience could run from the ad right down to the value exchange.

Playing on the infamous claim that avocado spending keeps young people out of the housing market, and the fact that VET graduates enjoy a higher average income than university graduates, the Avotar was born: a hybrid of avocado and avatar, with custom characters like The Creator, The Doer and The Innovator illustrated in-house.

The campaign targeted school leavers on Snapchat and Instagram with 9-second Story ads in a UGC format, native filters, lenses and emojis cutting through the noise. A swipe-up led to a Marketo-built landing page and the Avotar quiz: BuzzFeed-style questions mixing entertainment with study-area signals, with Marketo segmenting each prospect into a course area and sending their Avotar match via dynamic autoresponder. Split tests refined everything from UGC talent to animations, revealing that visual cues like arrows lifted click-through and ‘Take our quiz’ beat ‘Swipe up’ for completions.

The campaign generated 4,540,779 total impressions, 823 quiz completions, 188 shares on Facebook and 69 leads, converting at 10.37% on Instagram Stories, where it proved a huge success. TAFE Queensland now uses the Avotar campaign in school visits to engage prospective students face to face.