Next's Walk This Way campaign, created by Havas in the United Kingdom in September 2018, used an immersive Instagram-scroll format to engage graduate talent
Next Recruits Graduate Talent With Walk This Way on Instagram
Next's "Walk This Way" is a digital public interest campaign created by Havas and published in the United Kingdom in September 2018, designed to engage graduate talent through an immersive flat-lay scrolling experience on Instagram.
The campaign operates on a straightforward but precise strategic premise. Next, one of the United Kingdom's most recognised high-street fashion and homeware retailers, sought to reach graduating students at the moment they were weighing career options. Rather than rely on conventional job-board advertising or campus recruitment fairs, the brand and Havas chose Instagram as the primary platform, leveraging the network's native scrolling behaviour to guide prospective candidates through a narrative journey. The format — a flat-lay, visually composed immersive scroll — transformed the platform's standard content experience into something closer to editorial storytelling, placing Next's employer brand inside a medium its target audience already inhabited daily.
In the United Kingdom, graduate recruitment advertising had been migrating steadily toward digital channels by 2018, and social media platforms were becoming central to how employers reached early-career talent. "Walk This Way" positioned Next within that shift, treating Instagram not as a secondary broadcast channel but as the primary creative canvas. The campaign contains one documented media asset, as recorded on Clapboard, and was classified under the public interest industry category, reflecting its social utility as a talent pipeline initiative rather than a conventional product promotion. The Clapboard Score for this campaign stands at 74 out of 100, indicating a competent and purposeful execution with room for broader measurable impact.
Next's strategic rationale for "Walk This Way" rested on a clear behavioural insight. Graduate audiences in the United Kingdom were spending significant time on visual social platforms, and Instagram in particular had established itself as a destination for aspirational lifestyle content — precisely the register in which employer branding operates most effectively. By building the campaign natively within Instagram's scroll mechanic, Havas ensured that the creative would meet candidates inside an experience they had already chosen to enter, rather than interrupting them with interstitial or display formats.
The competitive context matters here. In the United Kingdom graduate recruitment market, Next operates alongside rivals including Marks and Spencer and ASOS, both of which had been expanding their digital employer branding efforts in the same period. According to MAGNA, global social-media advertising grew approximately 33 percent in 2018, a figure that reflects the broad industry confidence in social platforms as performance channels during the year this campaign launched. That growth was not uniform — it concentrated heavily in mobile-first, visually driven formats, which made Instagram a logical and data-supported choice for a flat-lay creative execution.
In 2018, Next announced plans to more than double its digital advertising expenditure, according to Marketing Week, signalling a deliberate reorientation of the brand's overall marketing investment toward performance-oriented digital channels. "Walk This Way" sits inside that strategic pivot. It is not an isolated experimental activation but a practical expression of a company-wide commitment to digital-first communications, deployed in the specific context of graduate talent acquisition across the United Kingdom market.
"Walk This Way" earns its creative distinctiveness through its form. The campaign is built around an immersive scrolling experience using flat-lay visual presentation — a production approach that arranges objects, garments, and compositional elements photographically from above, creating a continuous, navigable visual story within Instagram's feed or Stories environment. The technique borrows from editorial fashion photography and repurposes it as an interactive recruitment narrative, a creative choice that reflects both the brand's fashion retail identity and the platform's established visual grammar.
Flat-lay photography had become a dominant aesthetic on Instagram by 2018, widely used by lifestyle, fashion, and food content creators. Havas and Next's decision to adopt this format for a public interest recruitment campaign represents a deliberate alignment between the creative language of the platform and the aspirational positioning of a graduate employer brand. The scroll mechanic gives the campaign a sense of guided journey — candidates are not presented with static information but are instead moved through a visual sequence that unfolds with each gesture, creating a narrative arc within a medium not conventionally associated with structured storytelling.
Production credits for the Walk This Way campaign are not publicly documented in available trade press or agency records. The campaign is archived on Clapboard with one media asset, and no director, creative director, or photographer attribution has been identified in publicly accessible sources including Campaign, The Drum, Adweek, or the Havas agency portfolio. The creative ambition visible in the format nonetheless suggests a considered production process, one that required careful art direction to sustain narrative coherence across a sequential scroll experience designed specifically for Instagram in the United Kingdom market.
No verified performance data for the Walk This Way campaign is publicly available. No independently published sales lift, recruitment conversion, reach, or engagement figures have been disclosed by Next or Havas, and no trade press coverage of results has been identified from Campaign, Ad Age, Adweek, The Drum, or Contagious, as recorded on Clapboard. The campaign has not been recognised at Cannes Lions, the D&AD Awards, The One Show, the Effies, the Clios, or the Webby Awards.
Structural analysis, however, offers meaningful insight into the campaign's likely effectiveness as a recruitment vehicle. The decision to build the campaign inside Instagram's native scroll environment rather than directing users to an external careers page reduces friction significantly — a design principle well established in digital user experience as a driver of engagement depth. The flat-lay format, by borrowing the visual language that Instagram's graduate-age audience already associates with aspirational content, lowers the psychological distance between the viewer and the brand's employer identity.
For a public interest campaign measured not by commercial sales but by talent pipeline quality, these structural choices matter. The campaign's single documented asset and its classification as a digital-only execution suggest a focused, targeted deployment rather than a broad-reach media buy — an approach consistent with precision recruitment marketing rather than mass awareness. The Clapboard Score of 74 out of 100 reflects an execution that is strategically coherent and creatively purposeful, anchored in genuine platform insight, even in the absence of independently verified outcome data from the United Kingdom launch.
Walk This Way is a digital public interest campaign created by Havas for Next, published in the United Kingdom in September 2018. It uses an immersive flat-lay scrolling experience on Instagram to engage graduate talent, positioning Next as an aspirational employer within the visual language its target audience already uses daily.
Havas created Walk This Way for Next. The campaign launched in the United Kingdom in September 2018 as part of Next's broader move toward digital-led marketing, a strategic shift that included plans to more than double digital advertising expenditure, according to Marketing Week.
Next and Havas chose Instagram because graduate audiences in the United Kingdom were already engaged on the platform. The native scroll mechanic allowed the flat-lay narrative to unfold without redirecting users externally, reducing friction and aligning the employer brand with the aspirational visual content graduates already consumed there.
Walk This Way has not received documented recognition at Cannes Lions, D&AD, The One Show, the Effies, the Clios, or the Webby Awards, according to Clapboard. No trade press coverage of award nominations or wins has been identified from Campaign, Adweek, The Drum, or Contagious for this campaign.
Walk This Way holds a Clapboard Score of 74 out of 100. This reflects a strategically coherent and creatively purposeful digital campaign with strong platform alignment, while acknowledging the absence of publicly verified performance outcomes from the United Kingdom launch in September 2018.
Walk This Way used an immersive flat-lay scrolling format on Instagram. Flat-lay photography arranges elements from above into a continuous visual composition. In this campaign, the format created a guided narrative journey for graduate candidates, turning Instagram's standard scroll behaviour into a structured storytelling experience for Next's recruitment objective.
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