Many think scholarships are just for valedictorians or varsity athletes, so we set out to prove there's one for everyone – like potato researchers, candy enthusiasts, and even tall people.

Instead of using our media dollars to promote Sallie Mae's own services, we used billboards and Instagram to spotlight these unexpected scholarships, partnering with illustrators across the world to bring them to life. It was all part of repositioning Sallie Mae as a student support system focused on helping students find free money before turning to loans.

Before the AI revolution, research showed that 85% of teens used YouTube as their main search engine, not Google. So to further Sallie Mae's goal of helping students find free money first, we also shared answers where our audience was already asking questions: on Youtube.

We created a six-episode narrative series designed to help students “hack” paying for college, turning financial mumbo jumbo into practical, easy-to-understand advice. Knowing that video games are one of our audience’s top forms of entertainment, we turned topics like navigating the FAFSA and finding scholarships into a video game-inspired story. We even got Troy Baker, the legendary voiceover artist, to narrate the adventure.

We created a first-of-its-kind album scientifically engineered to help students study.

Research shows that music with 50 to 80 beats per minute can enhance and stimulate creativity and learning, and working in intervals of 25 minutes of focus and 5-minute breaks helps concentration — so we created 17 original songs all scientifically engineered to boost your brain.

We worked with the producer and composer Chris Plante, as well as popular lo-fi artists like TOLEDO, Jay Som, and Isaac Dunbar, to create the album in time for finals week of spring semester 2023. It’s available on Spotify and is accompanied by an album-length visualizer on YouTube.