THE BRIEF
How do you make a career in construction appealing for young South Australians?
South Australia’s construction industry was facing a talent crisis. With $67.5 billion worth of construction projects forecast for the next decade in South Australia, the industry urgently needed to bolster its workforce for the future.
Part of the challenge remained the perception of the construction industry. Students looked at it as a ‘second choice’ career, parents looked down on it and educators ignored it. In reality, the economic development of our state is hinged to the construction industry and its highly-skilled tradespeople.
The Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) engaged with Fuller to develop a recruitment campaign that would help make a career in construction just as appealing as one in medicine, engineering or marketing.
We needed to talk to the TikTok generation and get them excited about the benefits of a career in construction: learning and earning on the job, fast-tracking their careers and levelling up their lifestyle.
A strategy-first process, comprising in-depth workshops with industry stakeholders, tradespeople and school students, uncovered a clear insight: tradies are winners, and set the foundations for the Trade Up campaign.
Video
The campaign was launched with an inspirational TVC that painted the industry in a vibrant hi-vis spectrum of youthful energy, fun and purpose.
The TVC set the tone for an integrated campaign of punchy messaging, unmissable outdoor, thumb-stopping social and digital advertising, and vivid radio.
Brand
The ‘Trade Up’ brand was created to feel colloquial and authentic, using open source fonts and a punchy high-vis inspired colour palette. This was complemented by a lifestyle-driven photographic style that captured the aspirational outcome of trading up to a construction career.
Tradie Tales
A content series, ‘Tradie Tales’, put the spotlight on tradespeople who’ve been there, done that and are living the tradie dream, and snappy ‘how-to’ animations listed the steps to an apprenticeship. A bold audio track was developed to bring the campaign together.
Campaign
The campaign led future tradies to a newly constructed website where they could learn about different kinds of trades, figure out what they were good at and find resources to kickstart their apprenticeship.
Trade up is a call to move up to a career that’s packed with opportunities.
Through the campaign, we set in motion a positive perception shift for the construction industry, and put in place the building blocks to inspire a new generation of tradies for years to come.
In their words
