Using narrative storytelling in video to promote UAL Showcase

What does UAL sound like? How do we communicate the breadth of talent across our Colleges in less than 2 minutes? Which UAL staff member looks most like a gallery owner? These were just some of the questions our Content team considered when producing the new video for the 2025 UAL Showcase brand awareness campaign.

While previous year’s campaign video highlighted the wealth of creative work on Showcase, this year’s iteration used narrative storytelling to show how audiences can engage with the platform to find the missing piece to their project.

Here’s how the Content team worked with the brand to raise awareness of the Showcase product.

The brief

Around a third of 2023/24 graduates who responded to UAL Showcase’s annual career survey have been contacted professionally as a direct result of uploading their work to the site — from securing a sale to being offered paid work, commissions or a feature.

Briefed in by Vicky Creevey, Head of Online Showcasing, the goal of the project was to continue building awareness amongst prospective employers and collaborators by:

• Creating an evergreen series of films that positions UAL Showcase as an industry-leading platform and builds brand awareness for the site as a place for hiring creative graduates and finding creative inspiration.
• Supporting key campaign moments with thematic high-quality content for our external channels.

Working with the brand

Demonstrating Showcase's problem-solution journey

A key focus of the campaign’s storytelling was to show the problem-solution journey of a diverse range of prospective employers and creatives using Showcase.

“We felt a simple, visually driven concept was key,” says Ned Alderwick, Head of Content in the Communications department.

“It’s very narrative-led; we were trying to tell a clear story in a more editorially constructed way than we had done before,” explains UAL’s Content Producer Sophie Axtell.

The hero piece includes 4 scenarios, each presenting their respective creative challenges: an empty gallery with no work in it; a theatre with no set design or performer; a photography studio with no clothing on the rails; and a graphic design studio with no designers. In each scenario, the audience is introduced to a main character — a gallery owner or theatre director — who visits Showcase to search for the solution to their problem.

“We basically decided to use empty spaces as a metaphor for a wider problem,” says Sophie.

“You see the characters scrolling on Showcase before clicking on a profile and flying through the screen to transition back into the space, which is now bustling and shows all of the action — the problem has been solved!”

Leveraging UAL’s community to communicate Showcase

The team produced the video in collaboration with Grey Moth, an agency on our Creative Services Roster founded by UAL graduates — in fact, all elements in the video, from casting, styling, set design and make-up to sound design, editing and production management involved UAL’s staff, student and graduate community.

“Our ongoing collaboration and familiarity allowed us to concentrate the UAL brand down into a strong visual story,” says Alisha Fryer, Studio Manager at Grey Moth.

“We wanted to embrace the playful in a stylised, bold way, appealing to a wider industry audience. We considered the brand all the way through to post-production in which we used super clean editing and worked with an animator to create those bold visuals.”

“What's so brilliant about working with Grey Moth is that they have a really good understanding of the UAL brand already. They were very flexible with stepping in as and when we needed them,” says Sophie.

Supporting many of the technical aspects of the production — from providing the kit to bringing in crew members — afforded the Content team some breathing room to consider the creative aspects of the concepts all while coordinating around 50 people from across the University to bring the film to life.

Our own in-house Creative team designed the motion assets based on the Showcase design system, while the voiceover incorporated Showcase’s proposition language developed by Spy in 2023, another agency on our Creative Services Roster. This forms part of our style guide for Showcase’s identity, which was developed in response to in-depth research and an aim to better explain the function of the platform.

“Having that established proposition language from the Showcase team was incredibly valuable,” says Ned.

“Scripting is one part of filmmaking, but it's also about the messaging and the language, which the Brand and Strategy team worked a lot on,” explains Sophie.

“We always had the campaign language at the back of our minds, which helped to shape the direction, length and key beats for the actual scenes.”

As employers are more likely to hire or recommend our graduates the more familiar they are with UAL, the team decided to include disciplines which would benefit from a stronger association with our brand. Following additional research from the Brand and Strategy team, they also considered which disciplines were projected to be in most demand across the creative industries, helping us maximise career opportunities for our graduates.

“So much of the research influenced all of those search terms we ended up including and then used to backwards engineer the stories,” explains Sophie.

“Without that joined-up way of working, we would’ve run the risk of having just a very specific point of view, as most of us in the team previously worked at LCC or CSM.”

The result

The hero piece has now replaced last year’s campaign video on Showcase’s homepage, with shorter cutdowns being distributed as organic and paid ads across social media.

“We were all excited to work on our first big project as a newly formed team and be able to do something that was about a UAL-wide product. I’m honestly just unbelievably proud of the team,” says Ned.

“It’s a huge achievement as a wider collaboration between the Brand and Strategy team, the Showcase team and people from all sorts of different disciplines and backgrounds.”

“It was nice to work with a group of people who supported the work we were doing and feeling like we all shared the same goal,” says Sophie.

“Working together also gave us some safety that we were producing something that’s aligned with our brand system. I’m grateful the team encouraged us to run with our idea and be really creative with it.”

“It was great to work with the Content team on this one,” says Alisha.

Using our brand consistently helps us connect with our audiences, building awareness and understanding. Research has consistently shown that our strong brand and reputation is the number one reason students apply to UAL.

To learn more about how our brand helps tell the story of who we are and what we want to achieve, get in touch at brand@arts.ac.uk.