Best of CASE Asia-Pacific Region Award
 

Institution: The University of Queensland

Title of entry: Pop culture meets academia: Barbie stars in UQ's Contact magazine

About this entry: In July, Contact magazine – a trusted source for expert analysis on the trending topics that matter to the UQ community – leveraged cultural phenomenon, the Barbie movie, to engage our readership in an important conversation about modern feminism. We paired an emerging researcher with a senior scholar to write the feature 'Barbie in the real world’, on how the childhood icon stacked up to the feminist ideals of 2023.
The team created a bold design, maximising Shorthand features to create an immersive visual story. We utilised the iconic Barbie pink, nostalgic Barbie iconography, a bespoke photoshoot of Barbie in familiar UQ locations such as Queensland Brain Institute, at a graduation ceremony, and in the UQ library, and obtained a Warner Bros media license to include behind-the-scenes images and official footage.

The story was sent in a bespoke eDM to a global alumni audience of 184725. The team developed a suite of creative social-first content to accompany and promote the story. This activity received significant online attention and was shared and re-purposed widely.
Overall this was one of the top 3 Contact stories of 2023, with 50595 eDM opens and 8342 reads. It also received a 30% open rate from young alumni, a 2% increase from average.

Thanks to creative imagery, promotional social media content received more than 390000 impressions, 47000 engagements, 17000 likes, 3000 shares and 450 comments across UQ channels. It was one of the most engaged posts and highest results across UQ channels in the past year.