Canada’s largest private university has launched its first awareness campaign, with Yorkville University unveiling its new “When We Grow Up” creative.

The brand awareness campaign includes video spots about the journeys of three fictional Yorkville students. In each story, the students are asked what they want to be when they grow up, which leads to self-reflection and eventually the students realizing their potential. The campaign’s goal is to tell and celebrate the various paths students take to university, which sometimes involves coming back to post-secondary education after a short break or returning to make a career transition.

“The benefit of Yorkville is we managed to come up with programs that have more flexibility than the traditional education institutions, that are fully accredited and as good as all of the other schools, but done in a more flexible format, which should have a lot of appeal for Canadian students,” says the school’s VP of marketing and communications Drew Campbell.

Campbell stresses that a goal for the campaign was to showcase the flexibility in time and location that’s available to a student pursuing a degree through Yorkville. The campaign’s target audience, Campbell says, are Canadians that aren’t immediately coming out of schools, who are between 25 and 40 years old, and not fulfilled with their current career trajectory. The campaign is designed to appeal to those people.

The awareness campaign was launched to bolster the university’s credibility and visibility across the country, because as Campbell notes, despite the university’s size, many Canadians haven’t heard of it.

“We hit a point now where we’re trying to expand our growth across the country and want to generate some further visibility for the school,” Campbell says.

Campbell says the campaign is inspired by the work the school has done to connect with alumni to understand what kind of success they’ve experienced after graduating. It’s also come from speaking with current and former students about their experience at the school and what appealed to them about Yorkville compared to other schools.

The majority of the campaign’s production was created in-house, with the help of alumni from the Toronto Film School, which Yorkville University owns. The campaign is scheduled to run throughout the rest of the year.