We’re thrilled to announce that ApplyBoard’s Marketing Team has been honoured with two Hermes Creative Awards. The team was a 2023 Platinum winner for our organic TikTok growth and the 2023 Gold Winner for a comprehensive campaign focused on International Education Week!
These great honours recognize outstanding work in the industry while promoting the philanthropic nature of marketing and communication professionals.
About the Hermes Creative Awards
The Hermes Creative Awards is an international competition that honours the creators and messengers of traditional and emerging media. They celebrate those who use their imaginations and technology to bring ideas to life in the most innovative and creative ways.
Fun Fact: The Hermes Creative Award takes its name (and inspiration for the design of the statuette) from Hermes, the ancient Greek messenger god, who is also the patron god of literature, orators, and poets.
Get a glimpse of ApplyBoard’s six core values and then take a deeper dive into our core value of Caring About Each Other.
2023 Platinum Winner: TikTok
ApplyBoard was thrilled to receive a Platinum Award in recognition of our rapidly growing TikTok account. In August, our TikTok video on slang words any international student needs to know went viral and saw the beginning of our account’s meteoric growth.
@applyboard Dont look sus, slay these slang words and have everyone dead 💁♀️ #fyp #foryoupage #collegelife #internationalstudent #studytok #xybca #slang #studyabroad ♬ original sound – ApplyBoard
Less than six months after that first viral success, we’ve been thrilled to see 11 more videos go viral. Eight have received over one million views each and have collectively scored more than 25 million views. Plus, our audience has grown from 243 followers in August 2022 to over 166,000 in April 2023. That’s a follower growth rate of 68,210%!
And the best part? All of this was achieved organically—that’s right, no paid ads, and no influencer agreements. Instead, our world-class Social Team explored innovative ways to grow ApplyBoard’s engagement with a global audience. Their distinctive approach has shaped our TikTok account’s content, making it relatable, fun, and useful, with videos ranging from how Gen Z use emojis to reasons to study abroad in different destination countries.
2023 Gold Winner: PR Campaign
The accolades don’t stop there! We received a Gold Award for a public relations campaign on last year’s coverage of International Education Week (IEW). This included launching our second annual Trends Report, A New Era of Student Choice Begins: Top Trends in International Education for 2023 and Beyond, and multi-platform audience engagements around the theme of Celebrating the Bold. By bold, we mean those students who rise above the average and chart a new path by fulfilling their educational ambitions abroad.
We believe that nothing illustrates the profound impact of international education quite like the actual words and stories of students who have transformed their lives by studying abroad. With that in mind, the ApplyBoard Blog published Student Success Story: Arabelle. Arabelle is a recent international student graduate and business professional who embodies the word Bold.
In this Student Story, Arabelle shares her motivation for studying abroad in Canada: “I don’t want to settle for a stagnant life,” Arabelle explains. “I always want to improve myself … Education is not the easiest to access, but [it’s] one of the first things that will help you to improve your life.” The blog also posted other engaging and informative posts, including The 5 Best Reasons to Study Abroad and Celebrating the International Student Community.
All Brand and Design hands were also on deck to create the campaign’s unique visual identity, customized for each day of the week. And our amazing Video Team headed back to campus to sit down with a handful of students to ask them one question: What do you dream of achieving with your education? Their answers are as varied as the programs they’re studying, but a common thread runs through them: they all want to help others.
Many team members contributed to the campaign’s success: from campaign management and social media posts across our various platforms, to partner email outreach and website back-end updates. Thank you, everyone, for your hard work!
We want to thank the Hermes Creative Awards for this recognition. It wouldn’t have been possible without each and every ApplyBoardian on our incredibly talented and creative Marketing Team. Thank you for everything you do to help us inch closer in our mission to Educate the World!
