I have just taken part in a project, The Big Think, run by LRD. LRD is a local advertising company, they help local businesses with their advertisement to help get more awareness.
For The Big Think we were split into two teams, the green team and the blue team. I was a part of the green team and we had Emily and Hannah who work for LRD as tutors, they were there to help us along the way when we were unsure of what needed to be done or how we needed to do this.
We were set a warm up task, we had two newspapers, a roll of tape and a brick, the challenge was to build a tower out of the paper and tape. When we first got together as a group one member suggested creating a triangular shape as the weight would be evenly spread and therefore be more successful at holding the brick up. We also had the suggestion to create little pillars to help hold up the tower. We were going to use one roll of paper per side then I brought forward the idea of using only two which were folded in half then placed together to form a triangular shape. This appeared to work and was also a lot more effective for the amount of paper which we had. Unfortunately our tower was lower than the other teams but we worked well together and go to know the people in our group better.
We got a brief for a company which sells food without packaging. This shop could be revolutionary for the economy and the way which people shop as it is so simple and is also less wasteful, due to the lack of packaging and because of the fact that you only buy the amount which you need so you are not left with excess food at home. As a group we then had to come up with a proposition which is a sentence with what we see as the essential parts of the brief. This helped us lead to the creative expression which is what we use when making all of our creative advertisement ideas.
Our proposition was ‘Naked: The organic store for package-free, simple shopping’ and from this we created the creative expression. Some one mentioned the saying Bear necessities, as food from the naked stores is package free and you simply get what you really need. From this we got the final expression of ‘As bare as it gets’. We all thought about a good way to advertise this and that’s when I came up with the idea of using a bear in our television advertisement. My initial idea was to have a parallel edit of a bear in nature then a bear in the naked store to show that the food is as natural as it gets and is as nature intended. This was not quite going to work so after some more thinking we decided to have a bear walk our of its natural habitat and choose to shop at the naked store rather than just get the food from nature as it is so simple in the stores. This will also grab the viewers attention and make more people aware of the new business.
To allow our group to make the most of the little time which we had to complete the task we split into different groups to complete the different tasks which needed to be done. I worked with Sally and we looked into how we would use social media to help the business, someone else looked at the recipe cards as well as print ads and how those would work whilst the last two worked on the television ad and a script for the over voice at then end.
Sally and myself did some research about the different social media sites and how people already advertise their products, we were able to come up with a fun and interesting way to get people to join in on Instagram. There would be a competition where you create a meal with produce from the Naked store, take a photo and upload it to your Instagram with the #nakedmeals, there would then be a shortlist and the winner would get their meal to star on the naked stores page, giving them and the naked store more awareness.
We also created a print ad for billboards, magazines and buses/trains. I came up with the idea of a merged image of the bears natural habitat and the naked store, with the bear sat in the centre, this amplifies just how great the food from the stores is, as it is just as nature intended.
Once we came back together as a group we discussed all of our ideas, made amendments as we felt were required and finally we put the presentation together. We did have to pitch our ideas using this presentation to the client. We shared out the speaking roles and at the end when we were asked questions I feel that I had a good input as the client seemed pleased with my responses, as well as the responses from the other team members.
This was a competition so the client did have to make a decision of which groups pitch was better, he gave us some very helpful constructive criticism before announcing that the other team had won, I was pleased for them as they had done well. I was also proud of our group as we worked all together in the very short space of time having previously not known each other. This was a great experience and I learnt a great deal about what kind of things happen within an advertising company. I also got to see how you have to work to your deadlines and just how tight the turn around time can be.
Léonie Mayer 