Sun 30th Oct

Before Tuesday's lecture our group had chance to discuss our research and findings. I put forward my ideas for how we could market Skol and also explained my concerns regarding Brut. Fortunately my team members were of a very similar opinion to mine and were keen that Skol would be a good product for us to create an ad campaign for.

On the Friday (28th Oct) we organised a meeting to discuss our ideas in detail and how we could create our campaign together. Firstly we needed to find out and decide upon a target audience. Our studies unsurprisingly showed us that lager was most popular among males aged 18+. Although this information may of been obvious it meant that we could discuss the best mediums to advertise to them. We looked through a number of different male magazines and websites to get an idea of how brands already out there were catching the eye of their target audience.

We found that one of the most popular and increasing trends today is to create an app. Many brands have created little games for smart phones based around their product. We thought that if we could come up with a clever idea for a miniature game, it may be an effective way to advertise our product.

Our second idea was to create ad posters. A lot of male magazines included posters and it seems that they are still a popular way to advertise today, however the most effective ones were the ones that were eye catching and close to the line controversial. With a witty idea we could create an effective design.

Our final and third ad idea was to create a website. With the app that we are planning to include the website would make a nice addition to tie it all up. We also felt that this would be appropriate as many people may recognise the old brand name and be intrigued to find out if it was back. A website could provide them an opportunity to find out all about its re-branding and hopefully give us chance to persuade them to give our product another go.

In our group we decided that Bessam was going to be in charge of creating the app, Jack K's job would be to make the website and I am going to make the posters.

Above are the notes I have made from this meeting.

Tuesday 25th Oct

Over the weekend I carried out some research into Skol and Brut to find out which one I thought would be better to create a marketing campaign for. I will discuss both of them and briefly explain my findings:

Skol

• It was created in 1964
• It's name is based around a Scandinavian toast (as in raising glasses) "skål."
• It's mascot was Hager the Horrible - a large, manly looking viking.
• It's now the most popular selling beer in Brazil
• It is traditionally a light beer however its alcohol content has been increased

Brut

• Green is its identifiable colour
• The brand is most commonly advertised by famous sports people
• It has become known as a cheap brand
• It's sales have started to increase again and have almost tripled in the past five years according to the brut website
• It's aimed at "real men"

From my research I am personally inclined to push forward the idea of going with Skol. This is because I think that we have a number of different paths we could take to advertise it. We could pay particular attention to the fact that it is most popular in Brazil and have a number of ads exploiting this. We could also advertise the fact that its a light beer. With the UK's current binge problem this might be a good route to take.

I am put off by Brut by the fact that its advertised at an old fashioned, stereotypical view of what a "real man" is. The Brut website conjures up images of out of style middle aged men who drown themselves in the cologne. I feel that in comparison to Skol there are not as many exciting routes to take to advertise it.

Week commencing 17th Oct

This week we were given our major project brief. Our task is to create a new advertising campaign for an old/out of date product that is not as popular as it once was. Today (Fri 21st Oct) we had our first group meeting outside of lecture. We sat down and discussed the different choices we had and put forward any initial ideas. We quickly ruled out several of them and were left between Brut (a cologne most popular in the 60s and 70s) and Skol (a light beer, again most popular between the 60s and 70s.)

We have decided that the three of us will split up over the weekend and do research on both of them to find out some more information and how they could be marketed.

PowerPoint on Photoshop - Self Reflection

For our group project we had to present a PowerPoint to the class on the subject of Photoshop.

Once the task had been set we arranged to meet up the very next day so that we could work out a number of things to make the project run as smooth and efficient as possible. These included: what strengths people had and how we could play to them effectively (e.g. one of the girl’s in our group was confident with the software and so made her own picture with diagrams and labels explaining how she’d done it,) what we were going to put in the slides/what we were going to leave out and finally who was going to research and present each specific area. Throughout the course of the week we kept in regular contact via texts and Facebook to monitor each other’s progress. This helped us all to keep track of where we should be and also to provide any ideas and feedback if a member was struggling.

The slides that each member of our group was given were based on their own personal strength and how enthusiastic they were about their area. Each member was given four days left to their own devices to create their slide and prepare their own speech. At our second meeting we ran through what everybody had prepared and gave constructive feedback on points we liked and others we thought that could be improved.

The only real issue we had was arranging to get everybody together at the same time. Due to everybody’s difference in timetables, commitments and people living at home it was quite difficult to get a day that suited everybody. However, luckily this didn’t hold us back too much as people who couldn’t make it promptly sent us their work via email and the rest of the group were able to add it into the PowerPoint.

My slide was about the controversy of Photoshop. For my research I firstly went to the internet. I looked through old news articles about debates regarding the software and found a variety of exciting and interesting information. Some forums also helped me to gage an idea of what people’s thoughts and opinions were on the subject and also provided me with an opportunity to see if they were talking about anything that I might’ve missed. After that I then looked through real life magazines, trying to find clues of pictures that looked like they had been editing. YouTube also provided me with an interesting insight into how the Photoshop editing process worked and how powerful it could be. One particular video was very informative and interesting and so I added it to my slide to spice up the PowerPoint.

I feel that our presentation could have been improved by more rehearsal. Although we matched the recommended time of between 5 – 10 minutes, ours was just 5 minutes and 30 seconds, so at the bottom of the target range. I think that if we’d been able to meet up once more we would have been able to have a good run through of each other’s script to edit and improve. I also think we could have made our PowerPoint more interactive. We did have an original idea were we going to put a number of images onto the screen and let people guess which ones had and hadn’t been edited. However once we begun, this idea didn’t fit with anybody’s topic and so was cast aside.

Overall I am satisfied with how our presentation went, although have learnt a number of things that I will apply next time to improve upon this first attempt.