What you need to know:

• It’s taken years to happen, but with the help of half a billion from the SA Government, The University of Adelaide and University of South Australia will formally unite under the banner of Adelaide University from January 2026.
• To help drive modern and personalised digital experiences at scale globally and locally and connect every dot on the path from prospect to student, the marketing team has gone all in on the Adobe martech stack, from a CDP to a new experience platform, analytics, journey optimisation and advertising.
• The first cab off the rank was debuting Adelaide University’s global website in July, a light version of its planned website experience but one head of digital marketing, Emily Primavera, says is informed by insights and audience first thinking from the outset.
• A winning use case of personalising experience already includes work done to optimise and target experiences for Vietnamese prospective students.
• Thanks to going all in on the tech straight up, Adelaide University is able to track and measure an international inquiry, international application, and a conversion or enrolment in its analytics, where it is also looking at advertising data and website interactions. Per Primavera: “We can actually see our full journey for an international student in our platforms that a marketer might use. Previously, we've never been able to do that at either University.”

It’s a historic merger of two South Australian universities that stalled once, but had the SA Government’s Premier, Peter Malinauskas so enthused he threw half a billion dollars behind it to ensure it happened. 

Operational from January 2026, Adelaide University is the amalgamation of the University of South Australia and The University of Adelaide.

It will boast a position as one of Australia’s Group of 8 research-intensive tertiary institutions as well as maintain a ranking in the global top 100 universities.

As efforts to develop its new brand and positioning got underway (with the helping hand of branding agency, Lippincott), the marketing team was also keen to build a digital experience for local and international students both modern and capable of personalisation at scale. So

Adelaide Uni has gone all-in on Adobe’s experience stack, starting with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Cloud Service for its new-look website, and extending to Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) to unify audience data, Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP), Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, Adobe Journey Optimizer, Adobe Target and Adobe Advertising. Adelaide University has also engaged Deloitte Digital to help the team build and implement Adobe’s solutions. 

University of Adelaide head of digital marketing, Emily Primavera, said the standalone University of Adelaide had invested in some of the vendor’s technology previously, but it was piecemeal. 

“As you can imagine as an institution that's been running for so many years, and is doing that digital transformation, we had picked up pieces and were trying to evolve and transform certain elements. UniSA similarly had different elements of another experience platform, and different pieces that they were trying to connect together,” she told Mi3. 

“What we had the opportunity to do with Adelaide University is start a clean slate and look at what is the best enterprise technology and digital experience we wanted to offer for our students, and how we delivered that. It was about how we look at doing that in a way that is true to the strength of Adelaide University, the global impact we wanted to make, and the student experience we were really striving for as well.”

Going global first

In the first six months, the priority has been launching the institution’s new website for international student recruitment, which will go on to shape its overall internal and external digital experience. Adelaide University debuted the international site in July, juggling an iterating visual brand identity as it went along.

“We know an international student needs to consider moving countries, moving to Australia, and they consider a university about two years before starting – although even that varies,” Primavera said. “While we were doing that, we were establishing ourselves as a brand, establishing all of our touch points and our platforms initially, but with that global focus. A website is a really key part of that. That is our front door, our first version of the brand, and the way Adelaide University is coming to life. It’s one that persists and really starts and keeps us going through our global launch.”

From February 2025, Adelaide University will kick off domestic market efforts and campaigning. “As we keep rolling, we'll launch our online offerings, our current student transition, plus launch research, which is another really critical part of the university,” Primavera said. “It’s then about continuing to launch into our industry partnership and alumni spaces. But again, it's that customer focus we've taken to build a university that's underlining what we need to do first from a website and a digital experience perspective.

“We wanted to keep it really consistent and clear because then we can use our technology essentially to optimise the student experience for the audience or individual customer, prospective student, or the current student.”

Learning to test and optimise experience

Having come into the tertiary sector two years ago after several years on the South Australian Tourism Commission marketing team, Primavera was surprised by how much content universities have, but “how much is focused not necessarily on key customer perspectives”.

“We went to market in July this year with a very light site that focuses on key aspects of Adelaide University, that focuses on our key products, our courses, our degrees, our experience, our unique selling points, but not things we didn't need yet or things that weren't really key and core to our proposition,” she explained.

“It’s about making sure we're not migrating our sites and migrating our content and platforms, but building an optimal experience for our prospective students and current students. That's something that has been so challenging for a lot of us to come on board and pick up. But it's going to be so valuable. We are already seeing some great feedback and input from our students and prospective students on how clear things are and how different that is from our current institution experiences.”

Taking a data-driven process and approach has seen Primavera’s team pulling inquiry information from student-facing teams dealing with prospective students live to inform the website build and experience.

“We're using that to run our testing and experimentation, to look at some of those live insights, and how we improve and optimise our website, but also how we optimise our full student journey as well,” she continued.  

“For example, we had an insight that it was difficult to find when we were actually opening from the people calling and chatting to us. We were able to look at how we optimise our content to deliver that message more clearly and make sure it’s upfront and clear. It’s about using that insight while we go, rather than just building something one way because we said that was what we wanted.”

To ensure personalisation is built into the foundations, Adelaide University has set up the ability to integrate data on prospective students before they become a current student in one consistent view. This information on key audiences is being used in targeted advertising and media efforts for international markets.

“For example, we have undertaken some personalisation in Vietnamese to prospective students and influencers. We had a key insight that parents of Vietnamese students and also the students themselves need to see and would like to see content in Vietnamese. So we need to be able to offer that and to turn that around really quickly,” Primavera said.

“But what we've also tried to do is make sure we're not building audiences that are really granular for the sake of it, especially initially. We’re looking at what our overall proposition is as Adelaide University, and then how we be clear and consistent on that across all of our markets. Then we can, if we need to, go more granular with our recruitment strategies. But from a digital perspective, the way we're addressing our audiences is by using a larger and broader audience, as that will help us shape where we need to get to.”

Thanks to going all-in on the tech straight up, Adelaide University is able to track and measure an international inquiry, international application and a conversion or enrolment in its analytics, where it’s also looking at advertising data and website interactions.

“We can actually see our full journey for an international student in our platforms that a marketer might use. Previously, we've never been able to do that at either University. And it's not super common that lots of other universities can do that,” said Primavera.

A culture of testing and experimentation is vital, and new capability building essential. Primavera noted the two universities came with differently skilled and experienced team members and it’s needed to work with Adobe on showcasing the tech and running hands-on labs to get familiar with the new kit.

“My audience specialist is jumping in into the CDP and building audiences, but then also showing others how to use a CDP, or helping them understand what that looks like, and understand how they use audiences, which is so critical to extending that knowledge across the team and that way of working,” she said. 

“We've got lots of different formal training ongoing and coming up, access to platforms to do that, and trying to prioritise that while we're building. Obviously, we need to make sure we've got a team able to run and who are encouraged to use our tech and understand it. We’re also really working really closely with our IT teams. That’s really important for the space we're working in, then pulling them together with our media agencies and partners to make sure we're all working together, as well as with our creative agencies and brand development too. Because as I said, we need to keep evolving our brand in a digital environment. As we keep doing that, it's critical we make sure we're all really closely connected.”

It's been a busy six months of launching media while still building a website, building platforms, building tech, and building brand.

“To be able to turn around that personalisation immediately shows how much value we place on that, and how important that is,” Primavera said. “We've also got our experimentation framework up and running, so we can keep testing while we're we're building as well, which is really critical to refining our backlog and our next build.”

This experimentation and iteration mindset is also reflected in recent forms testing, which is how the university is capturing data on interest from audiences.

“We have a very basic form that captures interest, but what we've found was it's not direct enough. So we've been able to look at how we update our form to add more fields and more opportunity for us then to do different marketing automation and nurture as we go,” Primavera said. “We've been looking at the data of people interacting with those forms from launch so that we can keep evolving as the university evolves and as our nurture evolves as well.”

For brand, marketing, and media, Adelaide University is working with four creative and two media buying agencies. Richard Rose is its lead creative agency and Uni of Adelaide’s former incumbent agency; Fuller, WDM Studio, and Rodeo Creative are also on the books. The university’s media agency is Wavemaker locally and Hybrid internationally.