VizVid

In January 2019 MediaCross's higher-education marketing team and I ran a webinar for admissions offices, Leveling Up Your Campus Visit Experience, on the visit as the linchpin of the enrollment funnel and on what happens after it. The slides end on the product we were building for that moment after the visit: a video made for one student, from the visit they had just taken. The first personalized example, for a student named Paul, is dated February 1; the demo deck February 6.

That was the bet. Admissions teams already had the CRM record and the photographs from the tour. Nothing turned them into something personal a student would open.

The brand came first because everything the product produced would carry it next to a college's own: a wordmark and logo in March 2019, an app icon set and share image in May, and a palette of purples and reds that reads as the tool rather than the school. The how-it-works graphic, an isometric studio turning data into video, explained the product in one picture on the landing page.

The core loop is three steps over the dashboard. Add the visitor: a form with the fields a counselor already has open in their CRM. Personalize the video: pick the media that makes it theirs, the buildings they toured, the photos from their visit, before the render. Send it: the loop ends on the artifact itself, the student's video on the student's page, one button from their inbox.

Around the loop sit a dashboard that answers one question, is my campaign working, and per-campaign reporting that benchmarks each rate against the audience average and names the most active visitors, the prospects worth a personal call. Every figure in these screens is demo data written for the design.

In May 2019 the product went to two admissions conferences, CIVSA and NSCEC: a folded marketing piece for one, a full-page and a quarter-page ad and a Wi-Fi poster for the other, all in the brand. The landing page carried the how-it-works graphic and the demo. In July I wrote The Hatching, a fill-in-the-blanks video script a college completes in its own words, so a campus could try the product before commissioning a video of its own.

The demo was built for William Peace University in Raleigh while a sale to it was pending. Its student ambassadors lead the tours, and the tour is what sets it apart. Its personalized video greets one student by name, walks through the campus moments she saw, and closes on the university's wordmark, on a landing page under the university's own brand. Forty-five seconds of what the product made, for one student on one real campus.

The agency's engineers built the product as working code, and the conference pieces were printed for the conferences. VizVid, as redesigned, won the agency a contract with Spartanburg Methodist College, along with a digital viewbook for the college. MediaCross's own account of that work says VizVid was integrated with the college's CRM and sent each student a shareable video of their campus visit. No production campaign metrics are in my files, and none are claimed here; the engagement figures in the dashboard and report screens are design-time demo data, shown to explain what the product measured.

I would ship the measurement with the product. The dashboard was designed around one question, is my campaign working, and I left before a single real campaign's answer was written anywhere I could keep. A product that promises counselors a number should hand its designer the same number.