upGrad is officially a unicorn. In August, the edtech behemoth completed a $185 million raise, vaulting their valuation north of $1 billion.

Based in India, upGrad helps colleges and universities all over the world develop and market online programs—from full-blown master’s degrees to in-demand microcredentials. They’ve been hugely successful and have leveraged partnerships at higher ed institutions across Europe and Asia.

As upGrad expanded to North America, they knew they wanted to make a splash with the launch of their first US client—the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business.

Maryland Smith is a highly ranked, widely respected business school, and upGrad was thrilled to help them build out the Data Science and Business Analytics Certificate Program.

But they weren’t looking for just another boring higher ed marketing video. So our strategy and creative recommendation was to focus on drawing out the inherent drama that exists in the subject matter itself and in its real-world applicability. Data—and what people and companies do with it—is a cornerstone of global commerce and an absolute foundation of the world as we currently know it. From Facebook to Google to Netflix, there’s drama to spare!

That’s the story UMD’s prospective students need to hear—and the one that would drive enrollment. We loved bringing it to life: from leading intake calls with program faculty to conducting on-camera interviews all the way through the final edit.

The result is more of a movie trailer than a piece of academic advertising, and we were so proud that upGrad and UMD teams were as pleased with the final cut as we were.

“The video Anderson Strategy produced for our University of Maryland launch felt like a trailer for a new HBO show, not an academic program. I’ve never seen a university advertise like that.”

Aaron Edgell, VP Marketing, upGrad