After re-thinking our strategy we asked ourselves, how do we communicate with teenagers and university students in a way they listen and remember the information. Our best idea was shock advertising, an advertising strategy used to capture people's attention with controversial images or visuals which appear different to the rest. We would present these in a series of posters before the campaign surfaced to make people interested in the organisation. These could vary between purely image or purely type but we decided on a selection of both to complement each other, each would have a QR code on it to link back to the website.
Next was something more interactive, young people remember more and are interested more if it includes them. We decided on a handout which people would be able to open up, read through, and then fold out into a poster to keep.
We needed a source of information. A waypoint for people to get to and find out more so we can effect the amount of steps they are taking. We decided to get a website produced and I was put in charge of that and social media.
First I made an official e-mail address to link everything together from and provide a directory for all our social feed e-mails.
After making the e-mail address I created a blog, a twitter and a facebook page. I realised how annoying it would be to post on each one of them each time something happened, my solution to this was to link up both the facebook and the twitter to the main blog so every time something on the blog was posted, it was also posted on both social networks too.
The next priority of our project was branding and identity of the project. We all decided on a colour scheme and font in the studio after we spent a few hours searching. We wanted the colour scheme to be within the 2 colours on stock range in our brief but also eye catching and vivid. For this reason we decided on yellow and black on white stock.
Our font choice was something bold and eye catching. It makes an impact but also works as both body copy and headers, it's one of my personal favourite fonts, almost always does a good job at getting a message across.
We all went away to plan out logo ideas separately to then come back the next day with a strong variety to choose from. This was the point I was told to sort out the web side of things but I decided to make some variations too.
After coming back together as a team, we laid out everyone's examples and decided to choose Jasper's design after a debate between his and one of Dan's.
After choosing this one, I then mentioned to them how our posters were going to be black and white and the yellow wouldn't legible enough on a white background. As an alternative idea I boxed the logo in black with the website below it in yellow. Everyone liked this and said it was a good idea so we kept it.
Time was going very quickly and we needed to get a lot done in a few days. We decided to split in half between boys and girls. Laura and Melissa were in charge of the handout and we were in charge of the photo-shoot and posters.
Whilst they were busy with that, we sat in a circle and tried coming up with ideas for the photoshoot. We wanted people to remember them and be shocked but in a context where they were intrigued as to what everything was about before getting the handouts. We came up with the idea to do portrait photographs of each of us eating fast food in a messy and disgusting manner. Dan then came up with the idea to put tape around our faces in some of the shots to represent the fact our body was built and made of what we are putting into ourselves.
We went down to McDonalds and then down to Jasper and Dan's flat to prepare and execute the photo-shoot. I was chosen to conduct and direct it all as I had the most knowledge in photography and had a 50mm lens which was perfect for what we wanted.
The photo-shoot was a massive success considering we spent so much money on food and made a massive mess in the flat (which we did clean up after).
We then made our way back to uni and I started editing our chosen photographs ready for posters.
After the photographs were cropped to size and edited so the tones matched, I put the logo onto each of them to have the finished poster. We decided the top left corner because that is the first place the human eye will observe an image.
After they were done they went into production at the same time as the type only posters which will, jasper and dan made and a total of 40 A3 posters were made. That night, we plastered them all over uni in an attempt to have the students talking about them throughout the next day, here are some photos of us putting them up.
When we got back to university the next morning, all of the posters had already been taken down which disheartened us a bit seeing as no one actually saw them to stir up hype about our organisation. All we had left was our handouts and any other physical ideas we could come up with.
I got to work on finishing each of our social networks which ended up looking like this:
Me and Will came up with the idea of putting up encouraging stickers onto the stairs so people would feel good about using them and therefore use them more.
Thankfully these stayed up for quite a long time for people to see them and react to them. We heard people talk about them and we also got more hits on the website and likes on the facebook page along with followers on twitter.
After we had done everything we could and needed to, will and jasper made a hot dog book to accompany the handout that Melissa and Laura were still making, as a humorous way to grasp the audience of the university's attention.
Below are photos of both the main handout/poster and the hotdog book:
And that was everything, our brief wasn't very successful but we tried our best considering we only had the last week to prepare, design and produce. The website is still online if anyone is interested in visiting what we did.
Response to self evaluation:
As a group what problem did you identify and why?
We struggled to get the message to our targeted audience once our posters were taken down, so most people didn't know what we were doing.
What methods did you use to gather your evidence to prove this was a problem and what forms did it take?
Not many people on our course new what we were doing or had even seen any of the posters.
What methods of research did you find useful and why?
In the beginning it would be investigating what else was out there which was similar to our idea, we ended up finding something almost identical to our idea so we had to change it. After that it would be the shock advertising research as it inspired us to do what we ended up doing.
What research could you have carried out that would have proved more useful?
We should of investigated what we were and weren't allowed to put up in university and where because the fact most of our work had been taken down meant the rest of our project was rather weak.
How did you manage the workload as part of a group?
I very much enjoyed working with the group I was in, we were all determined and hard working. However it was just a massive strain on all of us to get everything done in such a small amount of time when all our ideas were nulled throughout the first two weeks. It also didn't help when there were miscommunications when people would be in or not.
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