One "Bikini Bottom" Twibbon to Unite

Ahead of a welcoming party of which he was the vice chair, Dimitri Matthew, a new student of Institut Teknologi Bandung, went to his Instagram to check out the posts under hashtags made for the event. “I was just idly scrolling, and it was like, oh, turns out this is my friend. That’s what they look like. We got to know each other because of that.” He was talking about fellow students who posted the Twibbon Oceanica, one of the campaigns on Twibbonize made to welcome new students of an institution.

In fact, throughout May and June, we’ve seen so many campaigns of the likes. In Indonesia, the Philippines, and most countries, the middle of the year is the time where schools announce their new admissions. 

The campaigns that surfaced are usually centered around specific institutions. But sometimes creators still promote heavily anyway. 

One that stood out for us was the 2026 class of the Faculty of Industrial Technology at Institut Teknologi Bandung (FTI ITB 2026). The design leans into childhood nostalgia with an elaborate Bikini Bottom theme. The support also piled up fast. As this piece was written, the count on their page had passed over 500, covering all of the FTI ITB 2026 freshmen, and actively shared alongside hashtags #OCEANICA2026, #MassaFTI2026, and #FTIInfinite across social media, especially Instagram.

The campaign wasn't only for fun. It led up to an event held online titled Oceanica FTI 2026 short for “Our Campus Exploration and Networking Innovative Connection Across FTI”, an internal welcoming party for the new students. 

So we talked to some of the people behind it: Dimitri Matthew, the vice chair of the committee; Khairani Nafla, known as Lila, the event director; and Luqyana Zhafirah, the public relations director. One important thing to know about all three is that they're freshmen too. This was an event run by the 2026 class, for the 2026 class.

Coming up with the theme

Bikini Bottom, the town where SpongeBob SquarePants lives, is the theme of their campaign. We love how this theme looks, but we did wonder how these students had preferred this animated series to represent them.

Under a tight deadline, the committee arranged a vote to elect a theme of their Welcoming Party, and other IP-titles were among the options. Turns out, the event team had quietly favored a different one. "We actually wanted Handy Manny," Dimitri admitted, citing an animated character who works as, well, a handyman. The character has since gained a niche trend on TikTok. “He likes to build things, so it makes sense to pick Handy Manny,” according to Dimitri, referring to their status as Industrial Technology students.

The Bikini Bottom-themed event – FTI ITB 2026

Nonetheless, the majority of students chose differently, and the committee built the whole event around the choice anyway: an icebreaker named “Ocean of Emojis”, and games reincorporated into the theme, including a werewolf game with characters from the SpongeBob universe and a five-chapter puzzle called the Krabby Case.

An event becomes a collaboration

So why promote an internal event this hard? Part of the answer is obligation. This year’s Welcoming Party was larger compared to the previous ones because it includes all students across all tracks of admission. The committee felt the need to succeed and exceed expectations of their fellow students. So they approached sponsors, tutoring companies and a book publisher which are already familiar with university students. 

But taking on sponsors meant the event had to give something visible back. The committee was quick to see that they have a mass to manifest that. So, first they created the Twibbon, naturally increasing the visibility of the event. And then they asked all of the members of the 2026 batch to follow the Instagram accounts of the sponsors, increasing the growth of the companies’ social media.

Increasing the attractiveness of their event, they also invited a guest star, Jessica Margareth, who was an alumna and widely known as one of the competitors in season one of a hit Indonesian collegiate game show: Ruangguru Clash of Champions.

This explanation by Dimitri, Lila and Luqyana actually reveals a remarkable element of their event. A collaboration between a community and corporations. At Twibbonize, we, too, notice that these parties, though on the surface seem to oppose each other, depend on each other. The communities had the mass, while the corporations had the means. Realizing and nurturing this relationship makes a campaign thrive and triggers real impact.

Participants of the Welcoming Party and guest star Jessica Margareth - FTI ITB 2026

But the more interesting answer is that posting the Twibbon became a rite of belonging. "Using the Twibbon was a point of pride, first of all," the committee said. "Getting into FTI is a whole process for all of us, so supporting and posting the Twibbon was a way to appreciate that." 

Then they made it a rule. The Twibbon became part of their attendance requirement for the committee meetings. They also made the Twibbon a way for the students to confirm RSVP for the Welcoming Party. Lila told us that a friend even went out of their way to download Instagram, since they do not use social media, just to post the Twibbon.

For us, this is one unique case of a campaign that both consolidated the students and made use of a community-corporate relationship.

A connection made

We thought making this a rule would make way for resentment. Instead the three confirmed that it only caused FOMO, a colloquial abbreviation of “fear of missing out”. They recalled when newly admitted students from latter admission tracks would ask for the Twibbon link so they could join right away.

The campaign almost worked differently. The team's first instinct was to split it by admission track. "At first we actually wanted to separate the Twibbons by track," Lila explained of a separate Twibbon for the students admitted through the government-issued tests, another one from the university-issued test, and the international program students. "But after we discussed it, we ended up combining them. We used one Twibbon to bring all of FTI students together." 

You can still find the fossils of the abandoned plan on their page: a few stray campaigns split by entrance route, one with five supporters, one with four, one even with zero. The consolidated campaign is the one that took off.

Once the gallery filled, it stopped being a promotional asset and became a recognition layer. "If you look at the accounts that uploaded the Twibbon, most of them don't know each other yet," Luqyana remarked. "So through the Twibbon, we get to know each other, like, oh, she's from FTI, and they become mutuals from there." 

The campaign was almost entirely community traffic, that is friends finding friends. Lila also made an interesting observation: "An event without a Twibbon, without that visual identity, feels incomplete," she said. "People wouldn't get an idea of what event you joined. The event's identity is known by the Twibbon."

For around 500 people who had just become classmates, the Twibbon was not the marketing for the event. For a few weeks in June, it was the closest thing they had to a face to face. "There's no way 300 to 500 people could get to know each other just by chat," concluded Dimitri. They chose another way.