71 million young people across the globe are out of work. Youth unemployment is rising while companies struggle to fill critical digital roles. It’s a stressful situation for young jobseekers – their future is at stake, but it’s tough to navigate the mountains of information out there, and discover to which roles they are best suited.

This campaign was part of the Future Digital Jobs programme in Vodafone’s Youth Initiative ‘What Will You Be?’, which aims to offer skills, career guidance and access to training for up to 10 million young people by 2022.

The brief was to find a partnership to create awareness of Vodafone’s online app Future Jobs Finder. The objective was to get as many young people as possible to use the app to identify the best digital roles for them, and connect them to real jobs in their region, contributing to the 10M by 2020 target.

Finding the right partnership was the key to this brief – it needed to have the right creative fit with Vodafone and its values, have obvious synergy with our goal of inspiring young people to success on their terms, plus be high-profile, global and spot-on for our youthful audience. Quite an ask!

We partnered with one of the year’s hottest movies, Into the Spider-Verse. This blockbuster had global reach and youth appeal, but more importantly it had a hero in new Spiderman Miles Morales who embodied ‘What will you be?’. As Sony Pictures Partnerships VP Andre Seddoh puts it, "Like many young people Miles is preparing to leap into the next stage of life, struggling to find out who he is and what he is meant to be.”

Miles brought alive the campaign theme and the movie’s message: anyone can achieve their full potential with the right skills and support.

We commissioned YouGov to ask 6,000 of our target audience 18-24 year olds in 15 countries about their career aspirations and concerns. 67% said they had had poor or no careers advice, 38% received advice on traditional non-digital roles, and 22% advice they deemed ‘out-of-date’.

We targeted this mobile-first demographic with creative to excite them, and the Future Jobs Finder to fill some of those gaps. We recognised Facebook and Instagram as key platforms, and recut our 40-second online ad as bespoke assets we knew would perform well with this audience.

A key part of the strategy was to talk to young people on their terms. Spidey actor Shameik Moore appeared in a campaign video talking about how his teachers said he’d never be an actor; then using the Future Jobs Finder to discover what digital job he’s suited for.

The campaign comprised fast-paced video creative, including a glossy 40-second ad produced with Into the Spider-Verse footage, talking head videos with the stars of the movie, and lots of snackable videos, all for online and social channels.

Star performers included 18 videos, eight to 10 seconds long, showing young people exciting careers in digital, science and technology. They inspired people to think about what kind of jobs will soon exist, from Game Tester and Emoji Literature Professor to VR Tourism Guide. Facebook and Instagram broadcast 12 of the most compelling on Instagram Stories.

Every asset had a clear CTA to the Future Jobs Finder where job-seekers took psychometric tests to identify their aptitudes and interests; these were then mapped to digital jobs, and job opportunities in their location. Users could also access digital training courses, and got a summary of their skills to use on CVs or job applications.

More than 450,000 young people have so far used Vodafone's Future Jobs Finder tool, introducing them to new digital job types, helping them discover the best roles for them, finding real jobs to apply for, and giving them access to free training and useful info for their CVs.

The campaign has delivered 39 million engagements in 18 markets from India and Albania to Portugal and Greece. The overall reach figure is 597 million and climbing, with record-level engagement for Vodafone in target social channels.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) Director-General Guy Ryder sums it up best: “This is a timely and welcome initiative by Vodafone. The digital economy has enormous potential to create decent jobs for youth which can only be realised if young people are equipped with the skills needed by our fast-changing economies. Tools such as the Future Job Finder can help them get on the right path."