During this 8-week challenge International Bachelor Communication and Media students will come up with compelling digital content campaign that has the potential to spread organically and will prototype the campaign content for your organization.

You will get 4-6 teams that will act as the creative teams within a digital agency. The course focuses on audience engagement, storytelling, and media planning (focusing on unpaid media and organic reach). To ensure the designed content resonates with your audiences and inspires active involvement, the students will engage with (small scale, qualitative) audience research, consumer insight development and design thinking-based process of campaign ideas development.

👉 Next to getting a content strategy and the content from the teams, this is an excellent opportunity to spot talent, and hire the students as interns. They will do an internship later on in the program (starting April 2025).

Sounds good? Read on 👇

✅ Key points of the challenge

• Number of teams per challenge: 4-6 teams of 4-5 students
• Course: Digital Content
• Program: International Bachelor in Communication and media
• Duration: November - February
• No. of hours spent per team: 180 hours
• Supervision: Supervised by lecturers from Erasmus University
• Deliverables: Presentation (in the form of a video) and the actual content prototypes
• Company time investment: Your time involvement is 8-12 hours in total (e.g. kick-off session, answering questions, reviewing the videos and selecting a top 3 and providing some feedback)
• Costs: €850,- (ex tax) when matched to one or more teams.

📑 The scope

Throughout the course, students will engage in a range of activities to develop their digital content creation skills:

• Analyze briefs from real companies and organizations.
• Conduct target audience research (desk research and TA interviews).
• Identify consumer insights and translate them into key messages and campaign big ideas.
• Develop mechanisms to enhance the spreadability of campaigns, both in terms of storytelling and media planning.
• Select relevant media platforms and content formats.
• Prototype content.
• Deliver a final pitch in the form of a short video.

🏢 Requirement for participating companies/organisations

• Any company/organizations (startup/scale-up/corporate/incubator/NGO) with at least 10 people working full time in the company.
• B2C companies only (meaning, only companies that have consumers (and not business) as customers).
• English-language brief and consumer communication (or openness for students to deliver the content in English)

💰 Costs

To help facilitate this challenge a matching fee of €850,- (ex tax) applies (charged by Master Challenge and NOT the university) when matched (this is a flat fee, regardless the number of teams that will be assigned to your challenge).

❗️Please note that Master Challenge nor the university can guarantee high-quality results.

📨 How to apply

You can submit the challenge (in English) directly through the website. Provide a title that summarizes the challenge (e.g. Help us with creating digital content that has the potential to spread organically). Subsequently, elaborate on your challenge. You might want to provide the following:

• Briefly explain what your company/product is about
• The topic of the challenge - what you would like the students to focus on specifically
• Target audience(s) (the students will focus on one TA only, but you can present more)
• Objectives (e.g. getting more customers, getting more traffic, building awareness, etc.)
• Tone of voice (e.g. formal, informal, friendly, humorous, optimistic, energetic, etc.).
• Keywords to use (if applicable),
• Core learnings from previous campaigns.

🗓 Planning

• November 7: Deadline for submitting your challenge.
• November 7 (or earlier): Receiving message if the lecturer approves your challenge.
• November 10-November 14: Matching phase
• Around November 24: Receiving and answering questions from teams.
• January 23: You will receive the Pitch Videos of the teams.
• No later than February 2: Share feedback per team with the lecturer and select a winning team.

Internships (optional)

The Digital Content course offers a unique opportunity for companies to get to know our students better and assess their abilities, skills, and talents at an early stage. By aligning with the course, you have the chance to observe the outcomes of the students' intensive 8-week work on a brief provided by your organization. This can serve you as an initial screening process and assessment center, allowing you to gauge the potential fit between the students, role, and your organization.

More information will be provided to the interested organizations.

Questions? Want to discuss your challenge before submitting one? Feel free to schedule a call 👉 here.