The Creatives Room

Best Back to School Campaigns

Back to school advertising is one of the most reliable retail occasions in the calendar - and one of the hardest to make interesting. The best campaigns in this collection found ways beyond the literal: Staples' 'It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year' turned a parent's relief into a comedy. Tech brands have used the occasion to talk about learning and potential rather than product specifications. The campaigns that have endured are the ones that found a genuine human insight inside a commercial occasion.

The campaigns in this collection

  1. New Liberal Arts - Revelator Press · Brandon S. Kelley · 2009

    Cover for New Liberal Arts. Dressing a forward-looking book in the sober red-cloth livery of an old textbook is a quiet joke - reinventing the curriculum while nodding to the tradition it updates.

  2. What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? - Jason Ramirez · 2010

    Cover for Michael Berube's book on the culture wars in academia. Making the book a notice tacked to a university bulletin board plants the argument exactly where it happens - on campus, among the flyers.

  3. Columbine - Twelve · Henry Sene Yee · 2009

    Cover for Dave Cullen's Columbine. The ordinary school dwarfed by oppressive empty sky conveys the weight of the tragedy - a familiar place forever changed, silence pressing down.

  4. Get Used to the Seats - 826DC · Oliver Munday · 2010

    Cover for a student-written survival guide for high-school freshmen. Crossed pencils like a coat of arms and a rank of classroom seats give the earnest peer-to-peer handbook a badge of authority.

  5. Back to School with LEGO Style - Lego · Mohamed Samir

    The return to school is rebuilt in LEGO's own visual language, so the anticipation of a new term is expressed through construction and play. It positions the brand as company for the start of the school year rather than as a product bought for it.

  6. Reading Fulfills

    Children are drawn to games and tablets rather than books, and childhood is a period of rebellion parents eventually stop fighting. The campaign redirects that instinct instead of resisting it, daring children to rebel by reading, with each poster built as a spoof of a literary classic.

  7. Speak Out Like Yourself - Duolingo

    People stall on a new language because saying it out loud in front of anyone is humiliating, and that single barrier holds back the actual learning. Duolingo answers it with a mode for practising aloud in real time, anonymously, with nobody in a position to judge.

  8. Back to School - Clínica Javier Prado · Fosbury Latam

    When children go back to school, the illnesses go back with them. The clinic builds its campaign on the part of the new term parents do not put in the diary.

  9. Here, someone will learn... - Papelera Plásticos · Malditos Agency

    Teacher's Day in Bolivia produces a flood of interchangeable brand tributes. Papelera Plasticos makes the country's plastic chairs, the object present in every classroom, so instead of a greeting it points at the chair itself: wherever one is set down, someone is about to learn.

  10. Dejavu (2022) - Dejavu · 2022

    "Dejavu": a young woman glancing back in a city street captures a fleeting moment of recognition - a nostalgic, romantic mood piece built on a sense of the familiar returning.

  11. Reverse Our Thinking - National Education Association · Weber Shandwick · 2018

    The campaign confronts public cynicism and defeatist rhetoric surrounding underfunded public schools and the teaching profession. The strategy centers on a palindromic reverse-poem structure: read forward, the script articulates a hopeless narrative about failing classrooms and overburdened educator

  12. Complex - Skillshare · 2021

    Skillshare "Complex". Skillshare frames creative learning as a way to untangle the complex.

  13. Back to School - Lysol · Havas Worldwide · 2013

    Lysol "Back to School". A Lysol spot framing hygiene and protection for the back-to-school season.

  14. Deja De Ser Copiloto - Volkswagen · DDB Barcelona · 2016

    DDB España's platform for the Volkswagen Polo splits the world into pilots and copilots - those who take the wheel of their own lives and those who let others decide. Under the hashtag DejaDeSerCopiloto, the campaign urges young buyers to stop being passengers and take control, using everyday situat

  15. Photo Day - PESO · 2024

    PESO "Photo Day". A spot built around a school photo-day moment.

  16. Back To School - Dior

    A back-to-school film for the Diorling collection by Cordelia de Castellane for Baby Dior. It runs through the specific rituals of the term's first days, buttoning up for the morning drop-off and the obligatory first-day photograph, positioning the clothes as pieces that hold up across all of it.

  17. Student Offer - Google · Impact BBDO · 2024

    Students know the pain of hitting a prompt limit mid-flow - so Gemini's student offer gives a year of unlimited prompts and Google's top tools free, dramatised across MENA as the moment limits break an idea and Gemini keeps going. The insight: for students the product truth is momentum; sell the uni

  18. The Child Marriage Prevention Loan - IPDC Finance · Grey Bangladesh · 2022

    IPDC Finance's Child Marriage Prevention Loan: Bangladesh sits in the top ten for child marriage - 51% of young women married before 18, worsened by lockdown poverty - so the bank built a zero-interest conditional loan that keeps daughters in school instead of weddings. The insight: child marriage i

  19. Teacher's Day - Mankind Pharma · ADK Fortune Communications Pvt. Ltd. · 2020

    Mankind Pharma's Teachers' Day film: the pandemic's real teachers were doctors, pharmacists, police and sanitation workers - the people whose example taught the country to cope. The insight: reframe the occasion around who actually did the teaching this year; gratitude as the lesson learned.

  20. This Daughter’s Day, tell your sons it’s just a period - Stayfree® · DDB Mudra · 2022

    Stayfree's Daughter's Day campaign #ItsJustAPeriod: boys told periods are none of their business grow into men who cannot discuss them - husbands and fathers who perpetuate the stigma. The insight: menstruation education targets girls and thereby preserves the taboo; the fix is telling parents to ta

  21. Desh Festive Campaign - Desh Magazine · SoS Ideas · 2019

    Desh, one of Bengal's oldest literary magazines, marked its Durga Pujo special issue by invoking Saraswati, goddess of art and knowledge. The insight: the magazine and the goddess stand for the same thing, creativity and learning, so Saraswati's traditional veena is replaced with a writer's tools, a

  22. Cyberbullying & Cyber harassment touches too many teens - Fondation Jasmin Roy · Ogilvy Montréal · 2017

    For the anti-bullying Fondation Jasmin Roy, Ogilvy Canada photographed students absorbed in their phones at school. The insight: cyberbullying's damage is invisible on the surface but total for the victim, so each student's hand reveals a shape that visualises the harm being inflicted through the sc

  23. Am I Next - the chaeli campaign · ogilvy south africa · 2019

    "Am I Next" for The Chaeli Campaign: South Africa's femicide rate is above the global average, and the organisation's point is that disabled women are just as exposed. Fronted by founder Chaeli Mycroft, an ability activist with cerebral palsy, the work dramatises one sad realisation - the only thing

  24. Swap Prejudice for Knowledge - National Geographic · Y&R São Paulo · 2016

    National Geographic Brasil's "Swap Prejudice for Knowledge": pairs of visibly different people photographed side by side with their faces swapped, tagged "the more places and cultures you know, the more you respect the differences." The insight: prejudice depends on faces staying where categories pu

Why this collection is worth studying

The back to school occasion is instructive because it demonstrates the gap between what advertising is asked to do (drive short-term sales) and what great advertising can do (build brand meaning while driving short-term sales). The campaigns in this collection achieved both - they were commercial and creative simultaneously, which is the standard worth aiming for in any occasion-driven brief.

See also

Best Back to School Advertising Campaigns - The Creatives Room