Yesterday was the last day of my senior advertising campaigns class. At the beginning of the semster our class was divided into 3 “agencies.” The client we worked with the whole semester was Conscious Alliance, a non-profit organization that focuses on ending hunger on Native American reservations (www.consciousalliance.org). Our goal was to increase awareness of the brand, drive traffic to the website, and increase donations. The target of this organization is college students
When we were first assigned this client, none of us were too ecstatic about it. Not because we did not think it was a good brand, or a honorable cause, but because we had a small budget and the haunting words “banner ad,” were said all too many times in their proposal to what they wanted from us. Due to the low budget this campaign definetely had to live on-line which, lucky for them, made perfect sense in regards to their target market.
To begin our strategic research we surveyed lower division advertising students in order to find out the level of awareness of not only the brand, but the problem of hunger on Native American reservations. What we found was that the level of awareness of the brand was next to nothing. While this was a bit discouraging, it was very exciting at the same time. It meant that there is so much opportunity for this campaign and pretty much everything we do will raise at least a little awareness.
After long hours of doodling and coming up with light-bulb ideas, some of which were quickly dismissed once we attempted execution, we finally came up with our key insight. We realized that as college students, we do like to donate and help out awesome organizations like Conscious Alliance, whether or not we’ll ever admit it…we like to be heroes, we like to be recognized. With this we decided that when people donate to this cause, they want to know exactly where their money is going, and they want to be recognized for it.
Fast forward a few months…our final executions were not too shabby. As anyone who knows anything about advertising will tell you, sometimes you have to take risks, sometimes they’ll lead to amazing campaigns, sometimes your endless all-nighters will only lead to a campaign the client hates. My “agency” got a taste of both of these situations. However, the latter wasn’t as bad as it sounds. One of our executions, the banners ads, had a dark mood, and the client said that is not what the brand is about, at all. BUT…theres always a but…had we not taken this chance with these banner ads, we would not have been led to the viral video we created, which was the client’s favorite piece of our work.
IF I LEARNED ANYTHING FROM THIS PITCH…you have to take risks, even if the client doesn’t initially think you’re idea is good, until it is executed you will never know…
