EF Language Abroad - Live the language brand refresh

Goal: Establish a new brand look and messaging platform to drive brand desirability

Learning a language abroad is a transformative experience. I was recruited back to EF in August ’23 to lead a 35-person in-house creative agency on the journey to establish a new authentic EF brand. Using a new color palette, inclusive gradient designs, adventurous map elements, and a progressive, repetitive font element, we were able to develop a very eye-catching brand look. On top of this, we thought about how this “transformation” and authentic student journey should be expressed through messaging, visuals, and the web experience.
EF opted for a staged roll-out to avoid material waste and allow for iteration. We started with digital, rolling the “Live the language” authentic brand out in social ads and on organic social, where we could immediately see the feedback from our target audiences and followers. This was followed sequentially web, and lastly in print and event materials.
To support the regional marketing teams, the EF Brand Hub hosted guidelines for design, copy, photo, and video. Templates were created on Canva, where markets could easily localize content for use on local landing pages and social media.

The new brand refresh kicked off with a brand awareness video campaign on Meta and YouTube. The videos were produced in collaboration with Deedy Group, with the ambition of presenting the challenge and reward of learning a language abroad. An uplift study was run, showing significant lift in ad-recall between exposed and control groups.

It’s not always sunshine and rainbows being away from friends and family, learning a new language in a foreign city. Students often feel homesick and insecure. Going through this is transformative. It builds real grit and self-confidence that EF students take back home with them. We worked to help bring this to life through our visual storytelling.

As part of the Live the language brand launch, my team collaborated with the social media team to curate a group of creators from around the world for a tour of California, where they met with real EF students, hosts, and toured EF schools. The creators, who had all experienced the power of travel and language learning firsthand, were able to reflect on this experience during the tour and incorporate it into content on EF’s owned channels, as well as their own.

After encouraging students to share their stories from EF schools throughout the summer, the team was able to edit the submitted footage into a second video brand campaign showing how real students live the language with EF. Dropping this at the end of summer and the start of the school year drove a sense of FOMO and desire for new students to travel the next year. The submitted content was also intercut with our first iteration of branded animations that played on the ideas of progress, perspective, and transformation.

While the campaigns were rolling out, our Experience Design and Production Designers were hard at work bringing the new brand design and messaging into the digital and offline product experiences for EF’s short, long-term, and university prep language programs.

After establishing “how” it is to “Live the language” with EF in the first two brand awareness video campaigns, the team partnered up with Deedy Group again to showcase “why” students should learn a second or third language. In a series of short, social-first vignettes, our protagonists use their language skills to overcome real-world challenges. The campaign was run on Meta and YouTube alongside an uplift study, showing strong recall and low cost per lifted user.