The Back to School/Off to College campaign for Amazon is a North American shopping event geared at getting kids and college students across all ages and stages of their education ready to return to classes as well as to campus. Every year, Amazon is there for millions of students and their parents across the country in acquiring school essentials, tech, fashion, room decor and more shipped right to their home, apartment, or dorm building. Running for three months between June-September 2024, the campaign overtook hero placements on the homepage, held its own shopping hub and reached offsite platforms in the form of paid display, email and organic & paid social in an effort to drive target audience to the site. Each placementthat ran during the event was strategically planned by the marketing team to ensure freshness, bring visibility to the different offerings and collections in the Back to School & Off to College hubs, as well as test and evolve how the campaign can show up for years to come.
Working under the creative team and leadership of North American Stores, I had worked on a combination of search and paid social placements to run for the campaign. Alongside the production and launch of the Back to School/Off to College event, Amazon was undergoing a major brand refresh that ended up bringing a new display font into the mix of its brand guidelines that directly impacted a more friendly appearance of the main brand and sub brands (i.e. Prime, audible, Kindle, Fire TV). On the marketing side and for this campaign, the brand refresh had provided a challenging, yet exciting opportunity in figuring out how the new font and hierarchies of text and graphic elements will play into launched assets while transitioning from the existing look to the new brand in real time.
Paid social, unlike display and most of the on-site placements for Amazon, is unique in not having as many constraints to work under leading to a more expressive approach of typography and products. The set of paid social ads extending from the Off to College Look book placements looked to the print catalog as a source of inspiration for displaying the large “Off to College headline” with the featured collection page.
Outside of Meta, I produced a set of vertical Snapchat video ads for Off to College featuring real college students from the Fashion Institute of Technology and UCLA. The videos focused on the social and community aspects of college, making on-campus living, athletic clubs, recreation and self expression the core of what makes these four years memorable.
A+ for effort
The Search results page played a pivotal role in directing customers to the top results and related shopping hubs. The tech team had run Feature Cards to suggest hub pages with event-specific search terms for customers and Autocomplete widgets, testing with ASINs and editorial image directions for showcasing Back to School and Off to college shopping hub collections as a key word or term is typed in the search bar.
Across product detail pages, In-line messaging banners also ran across the top of product landing pages to drive customers from a shopping page directly to a specific event-subpage or deals page for either Back to School or Off to College.
To appeal to the students across social media, a collection of paid social placements launched for Back to School and Off to College featuring editorial imagery shot internally by North American Stores and the Cross-Channel Marketing (XCM) event brand team. These assets served as a colorful, strategic approach of showcasing products within accurate price points and desirable curation of items that could be purchased from the event hub.
