St. Bonaventure’s College is stressing that it offers students a breadth of learning beyond reading, writing and arithmetic, heavily leaning into its extracurriculars and hands-on education.

“What Did You Learn Today?” is a campaign for the institution, an independent K-12 school in St. John’s, Newfoundland & Labrador. The hero spot doesn’t feature many students sitting at desks, but it does show them operating a robot, beekeeping, writing screenplays and playing sports.

Set to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” the words are replaced by students and staff singing bits of wisdom like, in one instance, a girl cheekily saying she’s learned to “question everything.” Students and staff performed and recorded the musical score themselves to showcase the school’s impressive music program.

“Mark Twain once said, ‘Don’t let schooling get in the way of a good education.’ That quote resonated with me during our strategy sessions,” says TJ Arch, creative director at Target, the agency responsible for the work. “We wanted to capture the essence of their approach to education, which emphasizes the depth and breadth of knowledge students acquire throughout their experience at the school.”

Arch tells strategy the institution has not done much advertising in the past, and what Target wanted to address was misconceptions about elitism and what students actually learn there. “The irony we kinda leaned into is that the academic outcomes at St. Bon’s […] are among the best in the province,” Arch notes.

He adds that the school achieves these outcomes almost by putting academics second. In the Jesuit school model, Arch explains, it is about sparking curiosity and not “about learning times tables and periodic tables,” allowing student to learn through exploration, as well as engaging in conversations around issues like social justice and world religions. Reflecting that it produces unique thinkers, copy in other ads features lines like “the mind is a terrible thing to cut and paste.”

The campaign will run throughout June across various media platforms, including online video, digital display, social media and out-of-home. Target redid the school’s website as well to explain to future applicants that St. Bon’s believes in creating good people, embodied by the phrase, “we believe in good,” and not necessarily instructing kids in Catholicism, as the school attracts students from different faith groups.

“We have a fairly small target here geographically for the school,” Arch says. “So, online video and especially delivered through social media is obviously very important.”

Showing the faces of kids in a small community is producing a lot of sharing.

“For St. Bon’s, this was a major investment and they did have to go get funds for it and do some fundraising at a school with not a lot of resources,” Arch says.