The KTU promotional video about how rapidly evolving technologies help us in most life situations has been praised by the public, academia, and marketing and communications professionals likewise. Originally in English and aimed for a wide audience in Lithuania and abroad, the video recently has been subtitled in more than twenty different languages. Thus, the information about Kaunas University of Technology (KTU) becomes accessible to an even wider circle of people.
Currently, the video can be viewed with Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish, Estonian, Turkish, Hindi, Carthage (Georgian), Russian, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, German, French, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Kazakh, Romanian, Vietnamese, Malayalam (Indian dialect) subtitles.
“KTU is an international university. We demonstrate this attitude by introducing ourselves to schoolchildren, students, lecturers, researchers, business partners from different countries in their native language. The list of subtitles of the video is not exhaustive – it will be constantly updated in new languages”, says Šarūnas Bulota, Director of Marketing and Communication Department at KTU.
The clip was first subtitled in the languages of the neighbouring countries to Lithuania – Latvian, Estonian, Polish. With the gradual expansion of geography, video subtitles have been prepared for audiences in more remote corners of the world, reaching as far as Asian and Middle Eastern countries.
“We want as many people as possible to know about KTU in their native language”, says Bulota.
The new KTU video is not a typical promotional video. It does not contain any “dry” numbers such as the number of students, faculties, research institutes, study programs that are usually presented by higher education institutions in their advertisement. KTU’s name is not even mentioned until the very end of the story. This was a deliberate decision: the narrative focuses on human imperfection, recklessness and weaknesses, and at the end of the video it is revealed how one of the situations can be solved using technology.
“We believe that in this way we managed to avoid the standard presentation of the university and at the same time to create emotion for the viewer – we send a message that the university is the place where new knowledge, technologies, innovations that help people are born. We’ve heard positive reviews, and people who’ve already seen the video say they’ve watched it more than once. This shows that the chosen visual solutions are engaging”, says Bulota.
The idea of the University’s promotional video was refined and implemented together with the KTU Marketing and Communication Department by Milk, three times in a row elected the best creative agency in the Baltic States.
All factual information on KTU – facts and figures, statistics, trivia – is provided on the website www.enterktu.com, created especially for the promotional video. On the website, the information is sorted by the different audiences, including business, academia, current and future students.
