Education
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Higher-ed publisher · DTC + B2B
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Ecommerce, paid media, ABM
Pearson is one of the world's largest education publishers. The brand had a global textbook catalog, but no direct-to-student ecommerce muscle in the U.S. ARSNL built the program from scratch — English plus Spanish targeting, state by state, with creative and audience strategy aimed at how students search and buy textbooks. The DTC engine then opened the door for enterprise and institutional accounts.
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Client
Pearson
Markets
U.S. — state-by-state targeting, English + Spanish
Scope
DTC ecommerce, paid media, content, ABM for enterprise + institutional
Audience
College students, then institutional and enterprise education buyers
The brief
Textbook buying has moved online and increasingly direct. For a global publisher, that's a structural opportunity and a structural problem at the same time: the catalog is enormous, the audience is fragmented across institutions and states, and a meaningful share of the U.S. student population studies and buys in Spanish.
Pearson needed a direct-to-student ecommerce program engineered to find the right student, in the right state, in the right language — and to scale into the institutional and enterprise sales motion that drives the publisher's core business.
What we did
We stood the program up as an ongoing ecommerce operation, then opened the second front into B2B and B2I.
- DTC ecommerce. Catalog architecture, product pages, checkout, and search wired for direct-to-student textbook sales.
- Paid media, state by state. Meta, Google, and programmatic with audience and creative variants split by state and by language (English and Spanish).
- Content and creative. Course- and discipline-level creative tuned to the student moment of need.
- Expansion into ABM. An account-based program for Pearson's enterprise education accounts — the same audience science applied to institutional buyers across multiple countries.
- Measurement. Revenue attribution end to end, with ROAS and channel mix reporting Pearson's commercial team could act on.
Selected work
Creative · DTC
DTC launch creative.
Creative system that backed the DTC launch in English and Spanish.
Web · DTC site
Site that enrolls.
Conversion-built DTC experience for the EN + ES launch and the B2B expansion that followed.
Media · B2B
From DTC into B2B.
The expansion program that took the DTC win into a B2B demand engine.
The results
Zero to scale
Direct-to-student online textbook sales built from no DTC channel.
EN + ES
Targeting and creative by state across English and Spanish-speaking students.
B2B
Expansion into enterprise and institutional accounts across multiple countries.
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Why it worked
Most textbook marketing is institutional. Treating the work as ecommerce — catalog, audience, search, conversion — unlocked a channel that was hiding in plain sight. The state-by-state, English-and-Spanish targeting matched how students choose programs, courses, and books. The same discipline made the ABM expansion straightforward: same audience science, larger account universe, longer cycle.
The case lives on both our Education and B2B pages because the program crosses both.
What's next
Then let's plan to get there.
