Zehnder recently had the opportunity to partner with the State of Louisiana in promoting their latest push for teacher recruitment.

The primary target audience for this campaign was a younger audience ­– recent high school grads and college students. In our conversations with the LDOE, we agreed that there can be a tendency for potential candidates to sometimes overlook teaching as a truly prestigious career.

The state education department had surveyed more than 500 Louisiana high school and college students and found that only 13 percent of respondents were currently considering teaching as a potential profession. The survey also revealed that students are “drawn to career fields that are less likely to be automated.”

In response to this sentiment we built a campaign that promoted the quintessentially human element of the teaching profession as one that cannot become obsolete. Our playful longform video even featured a fictional account of an unsuccessful attempt to replace a teacher with a robot.

Surveyed students had noted that they primarily get career information from social media and the internet. So, in addition to traditional radio, billboard and digital banner advertising, our campaign focused on long and short-form videos that would be easy to share online and through social channels (#BeATeacherLA).

This allowed us to show the wonderful autonomy that teachers have, bringing their own personal interests to work in order to create engaging new learning experience for their students. 

For more information on the Louisiana Department of Education campaign, reach Laura Gould at lgould@z-comm.com or see the work at Be a Teacher LA.