In the spring of 2024, the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine came to us with a tricky task: to restore the prestige of professional education. The goal was to increase the number of applicants to proftechs (that’s what vocational schools are called in Ukraine) in the fields vital for the country that is surviving constant Russian attacks.

To motivate teenagers to apply to proftechs, we needed to update these institutions' image and communication style. For this task, HyperNormal teamed up with the Spiilka Design Büro. While our colleagues developed a unified design system for all Ukrainian vocational schools, we focused on communication design and crafting content for the admissions campaign.

The PROFTECH font, central to the campaign's communication design, was created by Dmytro Rastvortsev, one of Ukraine's top font designers.

To make communication genuine and catchy, instead of professional actors, we made the real students of proftechs the heroes and voices of the campaign. Independence starts with choosing who you want to be. And no one can tell about it better than those who’ve experienced it themselves.

In the campaign’s tagline we summed up the idea that adulthood is about making your own decisions and embracing the consequences:
Your Independence Starts Here.

Besides the core message, we experimented with 20+ additional copylines addressing various aspects that 9th graders and their parents associate with independence, confidence, and self-reliance, — and tracked which ones performed best for further use.

Teenagers have plenty of unscrolled reels to check besides our ads (and we feel them), so we made our campaign as short as possible and designed it in a way to display all the main information in the first seconds.

These young people are the future of Ukraine

They are its independence, technology, economic development, and, ultimately, its happy and fulfilled people who have found work they enjoy and are good at it.

The genuine stories of proftech students struck a chord: by July 2024, the campaign drove 90% of the traffic to the proftech aggregator website.

‍We successfully reduced planned conversion costs by 64%, while conversions exceeded targets by 300%, achieving a CTR five times higher than the benchmark.

‍Additionally, the number of applicants increased by 12% compared to the previous year, surpassing the national average by 7%.