On 12/12/12 ALBA was awarded with the Silver Effie Award for the campaign FEE or FREE, designed by LOWE Athens, at the Effie Hellas award ceremony that took place at The Athens Concert Hall.
The Effie Awards were founded in 1968 by the American Marketing Association, New York Chapter, as an awards program to recognize the most effective advertising efforts in the United States each year. Today they are organized in more than 40 countries. Effie Awards are one of the greatest honors in the marketing & communication sector and have been recognized worldwide by both corporate communication executives and advertisers, and those who contribute to a communication campaign, as the only awards that evaluate the effectiveness of a campaign, reward strategic thinking, creative expression and the results are compared with respect to the default each time, marketing and communication objectives/goals.
In other words The Effie, awards Ideas that generate Results.
One of these ideas was our campaign “Fee or Free?” . The campaign ran for a short time (May- June 2012) but was extremely effective and successful!
The main goal of the campaign was to minimize the decline in the number of applications, due to the economic crisis, a goal that was not only reached, but exceeded by far! This dynamic campaign managed to reverse all data and prove once again that "Business unusual" runs within our DNA.
The core idea was to communicate to prospect students our scholarship opportunities through a more effective and time consuming approach. Through this, we managed to bring candidates back to us, bridge the distance that had been created due to the crisis and give them a strong incentive to take the next step.
The "magical component" of the campaign was the landing page within our website and the internal procedure followed to collect interest and respond to prospects.
By explaining that the pre-approved amount of each scholarship was related to the qualifications of each candidate, we managed to attract even more qualified candidates for the classes of 2012-2013.