UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

The University of Arizona asked us, "What makes Arizona, Arizona?" And "Wonder Makes Us" was the answer. First we looked at the reality of Arizona's challenges. It's hot as hell. Tucson is a pain in the butt to visit, with next to no direct flights. We also looked at the good stuff. The campus is surrounded by Wonder. Big majestic landscapes, mountains and deserts, but it's also packed with Wonder you don't see. The Wonder of all the incredible research being done there in dark rooms and labs and dance studios and practice gyms. So instead of shying away from the hot and hard to get to location, we leaned into it and built a world of dimension through a simple tension. Heads up wondering and Heads down doing. It's a universal human truth that wonder makes us do and all that we do makes us who we are. So what we have here is a story of self-discovery and world-discovery. Isn't that what higher education is all about? It was a simple storytelling system. Wonder + Doing = Self-discovery. And we could tell it over and over and over again because everybody's wonder is different and what each of us does with it is different too. As the CCO, I managed a team of creatives and worked closely with the University and it's marketing team to develop the campaign and sell it in to a whole lot of university officials who were doubtful the University could find a platform big enough to tell its story. But we made believers out of all of them with the power of make-believe. Despite the challenges of the pandemic, record-breaking enrollment numbers followed. We didn't set out to create a higher ed campaign, we set out to tell a human story through WONDER and all it makes us do.