Hi guys,

Wonderful job in class this week! There were many great ideas out there, which resulted in some very inventive advertisements. I would just like to reiterate some important points here based on how the classes went. Remember that in any advertisement, it is important to come up with a creative plan that will break through the clutter. Nonetheless, the creativity should not be such that the USP becomes hard to understand, or the brand image is lost. Many of you focused on delivering the idea that the double degree program is beneficial in some way to prospective applicants, which was great! Regarding the brand image, I would just like you to think back to Pei's guest lecture, when she talked about how you really want a brand image, that has taken perhaps 100 odd years to build up, to continually be reinforced within the audience's mind. This really just returns to the point about really understanding your product/service concept.

I wasn't able to show my doodle in class, so I'm posting it up here:
            
Basically, I was trying to use a slice-of-death/benefits appeal. I tried to think of a headline that wasn't perhaps related to other kinds of product/services (except maybe the army...), with the giant satellite below being the visual counterpart. However, I didn't want to lose the idea that this ad is about education, so the double degree program comes in immediately as a subheading. The rest of the image in the center is meant to reflect the slick and dynamic image that NUS has tried to build up over the years. In the bottom right is the picture of a student and teacher, possibly in what looks like a really conducive high-tech learning environment. The copy below plays on the "fear" of not being able to keep up with the need for communications competency in today's working world, and a URL is provided for the reader to take action. At the lowest right is the NUS logo, which we really want to stick in there because we want to use the brand to carry the product/service. As one group pointed out, the NUS logo with the "Join Us" below is something that I think people remember, and which we might want to consider re-using. A final note regarding the copy is that I tried to tie them all together to deliver a coherent message vis-à-vis the appeal that I had decided upon.

Ok, a final word on the project. I would once again like to say that this project will be graded based on logical execution. The product you chose is merely the means to an end for us to see whether you are are able to constructively and correctly use all the knowledge that you have learnt so far in this module. So, from creative strategy to execution, you should reflect in your report your understanding of identifying the target audience and product concept etc., and show how this influenced how/where you decided to deliver your ad message. As such, your creative draft does not need to look professional, rather, it just needs to be good enough to communicate what it is you're trying to do. For e.g., if you have a couple of people wearing business suits as a way to present a more classy image, stickmen are probably not going to cut it because, well, they don't wear clothes. So, do enough so that your idea isn't discredited, alright?

Hi guys. As promised, here is the table that I had flashed during this week's tutorial. My apologies to the 2-3pm class; what I was saying would have made a lot more sense if I had been able to project this (the projector finally kicked in 5 minutes before the hour, when almost everyone had left. :(). The table basically reiterates the main characteristics, similarities, and differences between magazines and newspapers as advertising mediums, and is referenced from your textbook. The purpose of getting you guys to review the magazines in class was to get a hands-on feel for how advertisers are in reality making use of these characteristics.

To summarize this table, the major plus point of magazines is that they can reach very specific audiences, and which is an advantage that the magazines we looked at certainly took advantage of. However, the problem here is that this leads to a lot of clutter, which was reflected by your responses to those magazines with a high percentage of single or double-paged ads. As it is necessary for magazines to retain its core readership with content that is of interest to its target audience, one way to avoid this clutter then, is to have more advertorials. I am using this term very loosely here to refer to editorial content that endorses a product (see p. 394 in your textbook for the U.S. case). [I will also speculate that in Singapore, there are probably all kinds of loopholes where the law that necessitates the statement "Advertorial" to be printed can be circumvented, but anyway...] Doing this takes advantage of the high-involvement readers have with magazine content; readers' purchase intentions will be affected by an advertisement that is surrounded by related content. Thus, for example, a reader who has read about how good a particular MP3 player is might be more inclined to pay attention to the MP3 player's advertisement within the same magazine. Unfortunately, this is not as feasible in news magazines, which is why they depend on inserts and such to achieve the same effect (e.g., the TIME Instyle magazine that one group brought). Finally, as was evident in the table we drew up in class, most of the advertising you identified tended to be of products or services that depend more on affect in influencing purchase decisions (i.e., luxury goods or goods with low differentiation etc.). We thus saw how advertisers make full use of magazines to push products that are heavy on the affect dimension by taking into account the magazine's editorial content, as well as the ability to present their advertisements in vibrant colors.

The final column in the table is simply to draw your attention to the fact that, even though magazines and newspaper are both printed forms, they have quite different characteristics as advertising medium.

Ok, that's it! Remember to stay on track with your reading!

Hi everyone!

First of, I would like to once again apologize to everyone for making the "informal consultation" at such a late hour. Charlene and I will try to coordinate things so that this doesn't happen again. But as you all now, there are extenuating circumstances, so we would also like to ask for your kind understanding when things do screw up a little.

Second, I would like to run through some of the administrative issues that students who attended heard, but all of you should be aware of. (i) Attendance was not taken for this week's class (1st October), so there will be no penalties if you did not attend. (ii) Although there are no more formal readings scheduled in the lesson plan as yet, I would like you to continue reading according to what was originally posted. So for this week, try to cover Chapter 13. This is a very important chapter because it provides many of the pros and cons of certain kinds of mediums, which you will eventually need to justify in your report when you explain why you chose, say, to place your ad at the bus stop vs an underground tunnel. So, please read for your project if nothing else!

Third, I showed some Internet advertisements (or advertainments) in class, and I want to post the links here for those of you who are thinking of doing something more akin to viral marketing. By the way, advantages of Internet marketing is in Chapter 13. Ok, the first ad I showed was the "Get the Glass" campaign by the California Milk Promotion Board. I also managed to locate the corresponding TV ad that directed viewers online here. The second ad I showed was Blendtec's "Will It Blend" series of ads. More background information about the success etc. of this campaign can be found on Wikipedia. As I mentioned in class, using the Internet gives you the power of interactivity, so if your target demographic allows it (they must use the Internet!), then do give it a thought. Oh and, if anyone has interesting ads to show, please let me know, and I can pass the link to the class.

Finally, I would like to give this general comment regarding the projects based on my talks with the various groups for those who weren't around. Basically, I noticed that many of you were not really able to justify some of the decisions you had made. But, because the aim of this class is to test how you are able to utilize the advertising concepts you are learning, you should be able to have a reason for every single aspect of your creative draft. So, if I asked you a "why" question for anything, such as why you chose a particular target audience, why you are using a particular color, why you have decided to make the brand logo prominent, why you wish to advertise at bus stops, or why you decided to make an ad that is affective; you should be able to answer all these questions using your survey or focus group data. In other words, find out what your target audience wants and give it to them! Don't forget that your ad's effectiveness will NOT be evaluated, so you're free to put it together any way you wish as long as you can explain why. And this brings me to my second point regarding surveys - the questions you ask should be as general as possible so that you can squeeze as much data out of your respondents as possible. There are ways that questions can be phrased so that the information received can become more useful, so take due care in crafting them! And finally, don't forget to identify the primary competitor as well, which will allow you to more adequately formulate a USP, and so that you can craft your ad to effect attitude change etc.

Ok, that's all from me. Happy Children's Day, and see you all on Thursday!