baadivejack-blog

[baadivejack-blog]

Seminar - Group Project

Falmouth App

During our last group project seminar we came up with some more ideas and potential solitions to outlr problems. One of our solutions was coming up with a an app where local retailers could have a page about their shop(s) and offer time limited offers/discounts where to get this youe will need to visit the shop within a period of time. As you have to actually leave your house and visit the shop to get the discount we believe this will encourage people to shop in real life rather than just online.

We also thought that we could mordernise the shops exterior and interior to cater morden trends which may intice people to go into the shops.

As well as this, we thought we get local retailers to offer a luxury shopping experience which could be by offering fitting sessions, recommendations and result in an overall a more personal shopping experience.

Another idea we came up with was highlighting the benefits of shopping in real life and the disadvantages of shopping online. This could also potentially be shown on the app.

[baadivejack-blog]

Lecture - Week 5

During todays lecture we talked about the creative process and looked at a few different diagrams which widely used to help develop ideas. The creative process consists of chaos and uncertainties but will eventually have more clarity and focus. 

Design Thinking

Empathise -  Put yourself in the viewers position and try and see things through their eyes

Define -  Find the real problem

Ideate -  Coming up with more than one idea, quantity is more important than quality at the moment

Prototype - Turn your ideas into something 

Test -  Testing your idea, giving it to your audience and getting their feedback

Design Models

Design Engineering - The creative process is not linear, you need to iterate and try different things, think laterally. 

Iteration - Creativity is a full circle, you need to converge and diverge. You will most likely go through this cycle multiple times before coming up with your final idea.

Double Diamond - Diverge and Converge until you com up with a defined problem. Then Diverge and Converge until you come up with a specific, defined solution.

5c model - Create, Collect, Comprehend, Conceptualise and Collaborate.

[baadivejack-blog]

Lecture- week 4

Recap:

1.    Creative Revolution in advertising

2.    Insights from, and references to, everyday life made ads relatable

3.    Dramatization making ads rememberable

Modernisms: modernists wanted to recreate history, believed they could design a better society.

Mies Van de Rohe – “less is more”

Dieter Rams – inspired apple iPhone

Joseph Muller Brockman – graphic designer, thinking about the page as a system, shopping it up, typography relation to size of the fields, scale, proportion and size. Used a lot of white/negative space.

Helmut Krone 1925 – 1996 – art director vw ad, used a system and proportion to his advertisement

Poetics in advertising – what are the types of advertising

Posters demand you to condense what you want to stay in a very still condensed message. This is one because posters are a small size and also because viewers need to get the message as soon as they glance at the poster.

Advertising – taking complicated products/ideas and distilling/simplifying so you get the message quick.

1.   Simplicity, economy, distillation

John Hegarty, 1998

Dada 1914 – 1920s – 40 years before creative revolution

Dada: “Art movement formed during the ww1 – negative reaction to the horrors and folly of the war. Art, poetry and performance was satirical and nonsensical in nature”

1.   Irreverence

Irreverence was a crucial competent of Dada art, to disrespect government, conventional production methods.

Chance

Used to embrace the random

2.   Wit and Humour

Taking everyday objects e.d toilet and putting them in to a museum

Surrealism

1924 – 1966, thinking subconscious – psychological developments

1990s – shift from r/o media

Vinyl – read only media

Changes in media

Birth of the internet r/w media

Massive expansion of delivery channels

Henry Jenkins – consumers were once silent, now are more active.

Jay z – decoded – Bing

Hunger games - Facebook

Building a community around your platform, crowd sourcing.

Advertising increasingly difficult to define

I found this graph which I thought was very interesting and proves how media consumption had drastically changed. 

Advertising creativity: Ads. Once sought to interruption now seek to engender participation, interaction and intimacy. (McStay)

Advertising creativity: Move from bounded objects to creation of events and dialogue.

Take away

1.    Shifting characteristics of creativity within advertising, shaped by artistic movements and changing media landscape

2.    Specifically the move from representation to interaction, events, participation and community

3.    Falling in love with the problem not the solution

4.    Problem Statement into a creative challenge.

e.g. nobody comes to our summer graduate shows - How might we improve marketing of the show?

Sorting problems: why? – what’s stopping us?

[baadivejack-blog]

Lecture - Problem mapping

In this lecture we talked about problem mapping and that is is important to fall in love with the problem but not the solution. We talked about how to problem map properly and effectively to help us find solutions to real life issues. Two things important about problem mapping is first finding the problem and then coming up with a creative challenge for that problem.

Group Project - Closure of High Street Retailer

In our last seminar we were assigned our second assignment which is a group project where we have to address the issue of why high street retail shops are closing and why shopping in ‘real life’ is not as popular as it used to be.

We done a few problem maps addressing the main reasons for why this is and coming up the ‘why?’ and ‘whats stopping u?’. We thought one of the main reasons for why retail shops are closing is because of online competitors. Shopping online nowadays is the way people purchase products as its easy accessible, convenient and quick. Shopping online is an effective way of finding exactly what you want as there is so much choice and price comparing with other brands also makes a lot of products cheaper online rather than in store. This is also because of competition as every brand is trying to provide the best deal and often have discounts or sales on. As well as this, shops have specific closing times whereas online shops are 24/7 you can buy whatever you want, whenever you want.

Another ‘why?’ we came up was that a lot of people especially younger people like students, teenagers prefer to shop online to avoid human interaction as they can buy exactly what they want from the comfort of the home without having to move or talk to anyone. This is also because teenagers nowadays are a lot more lazy and can't be bothered to travel to shops and they may not want to spend money or fuel or parking which can often be a problem. 

After some time of problem mapping we came up with 7 ‘How might we’s’ in which we can get people back into shops and off the internet. This us what ewe came up with.

How might we...

1. Create a rich shopping experience 

2. Solve accessibility to shops

3. Increase quality/quantity of products in shops

4. Raise awareness to young people about the problems with shopping online 

5. Reduce queue times in shops

6. Extend shopping hours outside of 9 - 5

7. Raise awareness of the benefits of shopping in real shops

[baadivejack-blog]

Research - Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in advertising

Recently I have been researching into theories that have been used in advertising. Maslow's hierarchy of needs was one of the theories that I thought was interesting and although it was not specifically created for advertising I found some print ads that incorporated some of the needs from Maslow's hierarchy theory.

‘Maslow's hierarchy of needs was developed by Abraham Maslow, a specialist in human behavioural psychology. The hierarchy was first developed to help explain the connection between basic human needs and human desires. The hierarchy, often visualised as a pyramid is split into five categories.’

https://www.professionalacademy.com/blogs-and-advice/marketing-theories-maslows-hierarchy-of-needs

I found the print ad above interesting as it has used Maslow's hierarchy of needs to display the importance of drinking water which makes the audience feel like they need ti buy it. This piece of advertisement displays the physiological need of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This is because the ad is promoting the importance of water and that we ‘can’t live without it’ and that people are always going to need to drink water no matter what, ‘Thirst is something that people will always have’.

Reference: https://adstrategy.wordpress.com/2010/10/06/maslows-hierarchy-of-needs/

[baadivejack-blog]

Lecture - History of Advertising

Adverting has been around for a very long time but it was very simple. Advertisements were only shown through poster, newspapers, leaflets etc...We also talked about how the only way of knowing what products you could buy was buy going into the shop and the products were often displayed behind the shop owner.

 Post World War 2 and 1960s

We talked about how just after world war 2 supermarkets were created and print ads were used to promote new products. Then, during the 1960s, Rosser Reeves - copywriter and chairman of ted bates conducted interviews with thousands of people in 275 locations to look at peoples responses to advertisement found out that ‘the consumer tends to remember just one  thing  from an advertisement, one strong claim or concept.’ He then came up with the idea of a USP (Unique selling point) and if you don't have one, create one. He said that your USP has to be strong and unique and that you need to repeat, repeat, repeat it.

Volkswagen’s Think Small campaign.

The “Think Small” campaign was developed in 1959 to advertise the Volkswagen Beatle. 

Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) had been contracted to advertise the new beetle. Bill Bernbach was in a tricky situation as America in the 1950s and 60s had a deep love for fashionable cars and this was a small, ugly car ‘that Hitler had a hand in creating’.

 Bernbach started the creative revolution by completely changing advertising. He recognised that he wasn’t going to sell the VW beatle by praising it so he done the complete opposite.  Bernbach was honest and even went as far as mocking the vehicle, something that had never been seen before. This lead to a huge boost in sales and a complete change in the way adverts were created and viewed by consumers.

Bill Bernbach and Helmut Krone- “properly practiced creativity can make one ad do the work of ten”.

We also looked at ‘Avis no 2 - We try harder’

I thought it was very interesting how they used there no2 spot to promote the fact that they may not be the best but this means that they ‘try harder’. This campaign worked very well as although they weren't number one, America loves an underdog.

Reference: https://medium.com/theagency/the-ad-that-changed-advertising-18291a67488c

[baadivejack-blog]

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being

[baadivejack-blog]

Recently in our lectures/seminars we have been looking at looking at ad critique. We have learned about the creative strategy - “The what”, the target audience - “The Who”, the concept - “The How” and the execution.  This is one of the adverts we deconstrcuted.

Coke Light Advert - This ad in particular I found interesting as its both funny and clever. 

Disassembling the creative:

1. The ‘What’ - Coca Cola light has less calories, sugar so is therefore lighter and this is shown by the coke floating upwards.

2. The ‘Who’ - Coke lovers - People who are maybe on a diet, trying to watch there weight, consumer less sugar. We thought this may appeal to both young and old adults as you get older you start to care more about your health (maybe.

3. The ‘How’ - We felt this ad was not very concept driven. We believe the execution of this ad is what makes it effective and a great ad.

4. The ‘execution’ - The execution of this ad is very clever as it shows the coke light to be floating upward as its so ‘light’. This maybe due to less calories, sugar etc.. in the beverage. This ad is very simple, there is no copy, just the logo in the top right corner. No copy is needed in this ad as the message is clearly conveyed by the image. Also we thought this ad has a vintage feel to it because of the off white background.

I found this seminar to be very interesting and useful as it’s helped me to better understand the construction of advertisements and given me a new perspective when analysing advertisements. 

[baadivejack-blog]

Follow this link to see some of the advertisements that I find interesting and creative. These ads help to give me inspiration when coming up with my own ideas.

[baadivejack-blog]

Creative Problem Solving - We had to write down existing online services on post it notes and stick them up on the wall in 2 different categories. We then had to choose one from each category for inspiration for a new app.

[baadivejack-blog]

Spoonfed- Spoonfed is an app which allows you to send food to poor locations all over the world. Inspired by the weather-spoons app, this app allows you to Earn rewards such as amazon vouchers by gifting food/water packages to areas of poverty.

First week - Introduction to creative problem solving

During the first week of lectures we were introduced to ‘creativity’, we learnt about innovativeness and lateral thinking. We were taught that ‘if you want to be interesting, be interested’-Austin Kleon, I took from this that in order to be recognised as an interesting individual you have to be engaging, curious and respectful to others and therefore people will recognise you as interesting.

We also learnt that lateral thinking is key to coming up with ideas and successful advertisements and that it’s better to have a dozen average ideas than 1 good one as you have more choice on what ideas you want to expand and develop on. We also learnt about remixing original ideas and to ‘steal like an artist’- Austin Kleon, as well as ‘breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way’ - Edward De Bono.

Be Curious- We needs to be curious in our work and invest time and research

Constraints- Set yourself limits so you stay on track as it is easy to get lost in your thoughts. Be aware of creative constraints - Money, Materials, Physics.

Don’t be afraid of failing - Get used to failure and be okay with it. Not every idea will be successful, often the best ideas come spontaneously so be prepared to have a lot of bad ideas before the perfect one.

Overview

Be playful

Don’t be original, steal, remix

Be childish

Think laterally - expand on ideas

Don’t be afraid of failing - be patient