Freshers 2026: A Race Worth Running

Still repeating the same marketing activities, caught up in a race to the bottom, but expecting a different outcome?

FRESHERS 2026 is your chance to try something new.

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Every September, around 500,000 new students arrive on UK campuses. Fresh, curious, and for the first time, making every purchasing decision on their own. No parents. No inherited brand loyalties. Just open minds.

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Yet most brands are missing this opportunity entirely. Which is madness.

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The performance marketing playbook is cracking. Take a look at the Beauty category. McKinsey's State of Beauty 2025 said it plainly: widespread discounting online risks becoming a "race to the bottom", eroding brand positioning and margins for anyone competing on price rather than meaning.

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We've watched it play out here in the UK. REN Clean Skincare, a homegrown brand that pioneered clean beauty, closed in 2025 after 25 years. Beauty Bay filed for administration in early 2026 after slashing its ad spend to almost nothing while competitors invested over £140k monthly. The pattern is consistent: brands that starved their upper funnel died on their lower funnel.

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Lush saw this coming years ago. They walked away from Instagram, TikTok and Facebook entirely. The industry thought it was madness. By 2025, Lush's CDO Jack Constantine was writing in the Drum that Meta's fact-checking U-turn had "reinforced and vindicated" the decision. Their own accounts show customer retention is stronger now than when they were on social. They replaced algorithmic noise with real-world connection, and it paid off.

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There's solid science behind why. Binet and Field's Long and the Short of It found that brands should spend roughly 60% of budget on long-term brand building and 40% on activation. Emotional, broad-reach campaigns drive the big long-term profits. Targeting only people ready to buy leaves the vast majority of future customers untouched.

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And critically: activation alone can't build a brand. No matter how much you spend on it.

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This is why campus DOOH advertising makes so much sense.

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When a brand runs across our Students' Union network of screens, it reaches a 100% student audience. Zero demographic waste.

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And instead of being one of thousands of brands fighting for two seconds of scroll time on a phone, they're one of just SIX brands on screen in an active real life environment where people congregate, in an active mindset, with impressive dwell time (40 mins + per visit).

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Freshers isn't just a moment. It's Gen Z consumers making first-time decisions across every category at the exact point their habits form. Win them in September, keep showing up regularly on campus, and you may have a customer for a decade or more.

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At Eighteen24 we argue strongly that Campus DOOH is a race to the top strategy. Now's the time to get involved.

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