For my final year module ‘Advertising Campaign Strategy’ at university my group and myself entered the Design & Art Directors (D&AD) student awards competition, this blog will demonstrate our creative process from initial ideas to our final piece.
Our first step in our process was to decide on a brief, while a few briefs caught our eye, for example Facebook, the WWF brief stood out to our group as the most appealing choice due to the mutual age range that the brief targeted and the interesting topic. The creative challenge for this brief required us to inspire the ‘always on’ generation that we all have an impact on our planet through an integrated campaign (D&AD 2015). Once we had decided on this brief we then began brainstorming our individual ideas and created mood boards based on the WWF living report (WWF 2014) and the WWF brief to get an understanding of what the group thought was relevant to the topic.
From this part of our creative process all members of the group agreed that these were the key elements we wanted to include in the campaign:
- Interconnected
- Social media
- Integrated campaign
- Becoming viral
- Hashtags
- Awareness/donations
The next step after we had completed the basic research was to develop an appropriate idea that met with the brief; this is where we developed idea number 1 which was an app that had a similar concept to both a ‘Tamagotchi’ and the Kardashian: Hollywood app where the user creates their own avatar and has to take care of them. The image below shows the rough outline for the idea, the user creates themselves as a park ranger and has to take care of one of the ‘big 5’ through different scenarios such as bushfire, deforestation and poachers. This idea was then taken to our tutor at meeting number 1 where we were given the feedback that the idea needed more development if we decided to choose this as our D&AD entry, but also various questions were raised such as how much would it cost to create? How much money would it actually raise? Would the target audience actually be interested in an app like this?
Following this first meeting we decided that to develop a more creative process in our decision making we needed to create more ideas and answer the questions that were raised in the first meeting in order to decide which one would be our strongest. On our third meeting as a group this is where we decided against idea 1 as we felt it would have a cost higher than the return. We then had a discussion on four more other ideas that were relatable to our previous discussions and mind map. Those included a viral animal selfie campaign where you would paint your face as various animals and upload onto social media and nominate your friends, a fancy dress themed flash mob and charades done via social media where your friends would guess what animal you were acting out, these can be seen in detail in the images below:
To help us decide our strongest idea we discussed the strengths and weaknesses, for two of our ideas we decided that the biggest drawback would be the amount of effort that would be required on behalf of the target audience therefore we eliminated those due to a potential lack of involvement. Another negative was the cost involved, for example the flash mob would have a larger production cost compared to the animal selfie and being within the target audience age range we also felt that we would not participate in the social media charades and the flash mob. This helped us to come to the decision that the animal selfie would be the best idea due to the previous success of similar campaigns such as the ice bucket challenge and the no makeup selfie and along with wanting to create awareness our other key element we wanted to include was donations and we felt that this idea would be the strongest in achieving our aims.
On meeting number 2 with our tutor he also agreed that the animal selfie was our strongest idea, however after further discussion with our tutor we decided that instead of just being able to donate to the WWF when you upload your selfie we added the aspect of purchasing face paints from the WWF with a £5 donation which we thought was a stronger way to ensure that selfie’s are not just uploaded without a donation. Once we had the basics for our idea we immediately started to brainstorm potential names, some of our ideas included:
- The Big 5
- Safari Selfie
- Animal Selfie
- WWF Selfie
- Save with a selfie
While I originally preferred the name ‘Save With a Selfie’ after a group discussion I immediately changed my mind to the rest of the groups favourite of ‘Safari Selfie’ due to the catchier nature and the stronger relevance it has to the WWF. As we also wanted to use the name as the hashtag for social media ‘Safari Selfie’ also fit better compared to the other ideas.
One of our original ideas for the newly named ‘Safari Selfie’ was to get the audience to take their selfie with famous landmarks from around the world in the background, for example in front of the Eiffel Tower, to demonstrate how worldwide the campaign could become. However we decided that this may detract from the main cause and the simplicity of painting your face at home and uploading the selfie therefore we dismissed this part from our campaign. As the viral aspect of the campaign will raise awareness we were concerned about the audience not donating so we decided that we needed to include an incentive, two of our favourite ideas were to either send them a WWF toy if they donated or enter them into a competition. With the target audience being 14-24 year olds we concluded that a toy is not something that that age range would be interested in so we went with the competition idea, we immediately suggested an animal safari holiday due to the name of the campaign however swimming with dolphins was also briefly discussed but quickly dismissed due to the recent bad press about swimming with dolphins in captivity (WDC 2015).
Once these various ideas had been discussed and the best were decided upon we finalised the idea for the campaign, we wanted to target an audience of 14-24 year olds by getting them to donate £5 to the WWF in return receiving a face painting kit, as they are required to include their personal details this was the easiest way for them to be entered into the competition to win a safari holiday for four. Once they receive their face paints they would then paint their faces as various animals and take a selfie uploading this onto social media with the hashtag #SafariSelfie and then nominate a few of their friends to also participate. The main concept behind this was to encourage the campaign to become viral through the interconnectivity that social media can offer the target audience; this is due the 64 percent of Internet users accessing social media within the last three months (Mintel 2015).
To put the idea into action we firstly created a storyboard for the final video (this was altered throughout the process as we were not satisfied with the ending of the video due to the lack of coherency) this highlighted the resources we needed to film this part of the video; including the location, facts, music and editing software. For the start of the video we wanted to include facts from the living report so we could make it hard hitting in order to persuade the audience to participate in the ‘Safari Selfie’ and to meet the brief, for this we took inspiration from this WWF advert where the narrator is using guilt to involve the audience. However we didn’t want this part of the final video to be all facts so we brainstormed some ideas such as showing photos of damage that has already been done to the planet, using video clips of animals similar to the previous WWF advert mentioned or showing a point of view perspective of an animal running away from danger in their natural habitat. As a group we chose the last idea as we felt this was the most captivating for the audience, while we would like to have used animals in the advert, such as a lion, this was not something that we would be able to achieve. To keep this part simple we decided against music and just added a heartbeat to keep the focus on the facts, something we changed during the editing was the pace of the heartbeat, which we gradually quickened throughout to demonstrate the increased speed and danger for the animal running.
One problem we encountered with filming the start of the video was finding the right location that would look like a safari style location, due to time constraints we were unable to wait for the weather to change so we had to film this part when we could and warm the colouring of the video so it looked accurate. Once we had filmed the first part of the final video we needed to edit the clips together, we were originally going using the website PowToon to do this due to a previous entry we had seen using this website, however we came to realise that we were unable to edit the clips together using this. We did some research and concluded that iMovie would be a suitable software to use, one of the main problems we found when editing the video was that it was over the 2 minute limit therefore had to reduce certain clips in order to get it under the 2 minute mark without losing anything integral to the video.
The next step was to create the social media idea and for this part we were able to use PowToons we wanted to keep this a simple step-by-step guide on how to participate and the benefits that this will have for the planet. Originally we only were going to include the guide on the ‘Safari Selfie’ however once we watched the video through it became apparent that we needed to highlight to the audience the benefits that the donations would have. Something that we perhaps could change if we were to do this again would be to decide on the layout before we started to create this part as we played around with the layouts and fonts as we went along, this meant that some animation didn’t flow which was pointed out by our tutor during our final meeting which we were able to change. During the final meeting it was also suggested that the font colour could perhaps be changed from white however this was one of the limitations we found with the PowToons software, as it was something that we couldn’t change.
At this point we also needed to decide on a final song, while we originally wanted the ‘Lion King’ song or ‘In the Jungle’ we were unable to use those due to copyright therefore we decided on simple African tribe music, although this was not what we had originally wanted I feel like this is well suited as it doesn’t detract from the content.
The final stage was to show our tutor the final video to ensure that there was no spelling errors, any last minute changes to the content and that it runs fluently under the 2 minute limit, it was then submitted to the D&AD competition.
References:
D&AD, (2015). WWF Brief – New Blood Awards 2015. [online] Available from: http://www.dandad.org/en/wwf-Inspire-action-for-our-planet/ [Accessed 26th April 2015].
Mintel (2015) Digital Trends Spring – UK – March 2015. [Online] Available from: Mintel [Accessed 26th April 2015].
Powtoon (2015) Powtoon. [Online] Available from: http://www.powtoon.com [Accessed 26th April 2015].
WDC (2015) Swimming With Dolphins. [Online] Available from: http://uk.whales.org/issues/swimming-with-dolphins [Accessed 4th May 2015].
WWF (2014) Living Planet Report. [Online] Available from: http://www.wwf.org.uk/about_wwf/other_publications/living_planet_report_2014/#.VUD2J1z4slI [Accessed 26th April 2015].
WWF (2015) WWF UK. [Online] Available from: http://www.wwf.org.uk [Accessed 26th April 2015].
YouTube (2011) Adopt a wild snow leopard – WWF-UK. [Online] Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTjiWy_1FEE&spfreload=10 [Accessed 4th May 2015].
CREATIVE BRIEF 