Duckflix Series

Strategy

Duckflix is a series of short videos starring the Oregon Duck, packaged like a streaming service — the name is a Netflix nod. Each episode spoofs a franchise at the height of its cultural moment, so the Duck shows up in the conversation people are already having.

The fun was the vehicle; enrollment was the point. If prospective students saw the Duck, got excited about the Duck, and came away thinking a university that makes things like this must be a pretty great place to be, the series had done its job. Affinity with current fans came along with it.

Audience

• Primary: prospective students — and the families helping them choose — who meet Oregon first through social.
• Secondary: current students, alumni, and Ducks fans, plus the wider college-football and pop-culture audience who find the videos through the franchise being spoofed.

Goals

• Make Oregon memorable and appealing to prospective students, supporting enrollment.
• Show a university with personality — one confident and creative enough to make this.
• Build affinity with the Ducks audience between and around games.
• Tie each episode to a university moment — rivalry week, Decision Day — and a pop-culture one.
• Create evergreen videos that can be brought back whenever the moment returns.

Touchpoints

A streaming-platform wrapper held the series together, and the launch post set up the premise in one line: "There aren't enough streaming services out there. That's why the Duck made his own!" Each video is a 60- to 90-second episode that borrows the look and feel of the franchise it's spoofing, recast around the Duck — short enough to watch in the feed, built to be shared.

I worked on the production team rather than as the director: helping concept the series and generate ideas behind the scenes, assisting on the shoots, and supporting the edit.

Yield

The series passed 2 million views and more than 50,000 engagements, all of it organic. Super Duck ran for Decision Day in spring 2019, and that fall the University of Oregon enrolled a record 4,560 first-year students — the product of a much larger recruitment effort, but the class the series was made to help bring in. Star Duck became the breakout and the most exemplary of the idea: a video with a built-in annual moment, so it has a reason to come back every year — and every time it does, Oregon gets another turn in front of the students it hopes to recruit.