When I started my path toward an advertising career, I was all set to someday join the creative department at an ad agency. Designing logos, making videos, and developing websites were the destinations on my horizon.
I got involved with designing for several on-campus organizations and acquired a few freelance design gigs my freshman year, taking the first few steps on that journey I had laid out before me. But as I got further into my coursework and completed various campaigns for class projects, I was exposed to the other parts of advertising: research, media, and account planning. As I started to expand my skills, I came to love all of it. You want to talk PRIZM categories and target audience analysis? Let’s go – statistics, charts, infographics – you’re speaking my language. How can we connect with consumers – mobile, television, out-of-home? Research and media planning are the shiz. Although still passionate about creative work, I started to develop similar passion for the other areas. If you asked me right now which area I would like to work in for the rest of my life, I couldn’t say because I think all of them are great. So that got me to start considering account planning, which primarily involves coordinating all the divisions and serving as the liaison between the client and agency for the duration of the campaign. When my freshman year advertising teacher first mentioned this part of advertising, my eyes started to glaze over at the idea of the role – how boring it would be to not be the one actually executing specific parts of the campaign! But now, the position of account planner is more appealing to me. It offers the opportunity to work with all the other areas that interest me, and the account planner is involved with a campaign from start to finish. Right now, I’m serving as the account planner for my senior project team, and I love it. Of course, I would be perfectly happy in any of the other positions as well. I will continue to apply for design internships, look for opportunities to conduct research, and devise clever media plans. But I will stay thankful for the opportunity to work as the account planner for my senior project and gain a perspective different from any I had imagined just two years ago.
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Our lives are full of learning opportunities. We can learn from our superiors, our peers, and our subordinates. We can learn from events, mistakes, and accomplishments. When we have not only the ability but also the desire to learn, we’re able to expand our knowledge, better understand others, and achieve greater success.
This is especially true with advertising. There is a significant amount of learning for every campaign. Because you work for a variety of clients, you often have to become experts on a wide range of industries, from bank financing to medical techniques, clothes-making to beer-brewing. Every campaign requires research, not only about the client, but also about the target audience, market trends, competitors, and more. Having an innate curiosity can help drive a campaign to success. It’s curiosity that drives advertising professionals to engage in ethnographic research to truly understand consumers: their preferences, what motivates them, and where they spend their time. It’s curiosity that pushes a campaign from a simple sales appeal to a truly effective relationship-building process. Having this curiosity involves always asking questions. Who are we targeting? How are they spending their time? Why are they thinking that way? Most often, the real curiosity leads to that ‘Why’ question; it’s that craving to understand that helps a campaign. Anyone can conduct research. You can create a pretty comprehensive situation analysis just by reading and surveying. But when you have that desire to learn not just for the campaign but also to satisfy your search for knowledge, you gain a wider perspective and can provide more insights to the campaign process. Don’t settle for simple responses. When you’re in a focus group and a participant says she likes to shop at Target, dig deeper. Ask, why does she like it? Why doesn’t she like competitors? What does she like about it? How often does she shop there? Develop that trait of curiosity. Extend it beyond just your work. Implement it into your life. When you seize every learning opportunity, you increase your level of knowledge, and often, you also increase your level of happiness. It’s that time of year again: job applications are stacking up, and the calendar is being filled with interviews. As I send out applications, I can’t help but shudder at what I consider one of the hardest forms of advertising: selling myself.
I can devise a full advertising campaign for a local pottery studio, promote a Service on Saturday event so that it attracts 300+ volunteers, and launch a social media campaign to raise awareness about safe drinking habits, but when it comes to promoting myself, I often feel uncomfortable about it. And that’s exactly what the job application process is: selling yourself to employers. Yet, my natural shyness and determination to acknowledge the work of others makes it difficult for me to speak about my accomplishments in interviews. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m able to compose a strong résumé and LinkedIn portfolio so that I look good on paper, but when it comes to the in-person interview, I tend to undersell myself or stumble over my words when I try to describe some of my more impressive achievements. In an interview just today, I caught myself talking more about how fortunate I have been to lead organizations with passionate members that have accomplished great things, not mentioning the roles I took to make those things happen. I attributed a few of my business brainchilds for The Scout to our advertising manager because I felt as though I would be bragging if I claimed credit myself. While this attitude may be good within the organizations I lead, it doesn’t exactly help me get a job if I can’t promote myself. The truth is, I take great pride in my work. I enjoy applying my skills to various projects, and I love working with others to produce work that is better than each of us could have made individually. I know that I am capable of accomplishing impressive tasks, but it’s hard for me to discuss this with others. If you’re mortified by the idea of an hour-long interview with a majority of that time being spent talking about how much you rock, join the club. Maybe we could band together and speak about each other instead of ourselves. Although the title to this may be a lame pun attempt based on “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” I can’t help but have a guilty pleasure for puns in advertising.
Professionals and professors will spew hatred at advertising puns, as their effectiveness is questionable. Besides often being poorly executed, puns experience great wear out and may annoy customers. Although they may be out of place for large-scale professional campaigns, I’ve rather enjoyed using them in narrower content for my own campus organizations. There are few things more fun than having a brainstorming session to come up with “punny” slogans that will attract attention and create a buzz. As president of SONOR, a student advertising organization that promotes positive messages about the social norms of alcohol and substance use among Bradley students, I was part of the organization’s first campaigns addressing marijuana usage last semester. We launched a killer campaign that had students talking in person, on Yik Yak, and via social media about our promotions, which all featured puns. We gave out water bottles encouraging students to stay “HIGHdrated,” brownies encouraging students to always know their source and saying they were “BAKED by your friends in SONOR,” and fruit roll-ups that said, “Not to be BLUNT, but we know we’re on a ROLL.” Presenting statistics about usage on campus alongside sayings such as “It’s no toke” and hashtags of #HighHopesForTheHilltop and #WeedOutTheRumors, our whole campaign centered around puns. Taking an often taboo subject and discussing it in a way that was casual and connected with the audience while still promoting safe habits allowed us to have fun with the campaign and also drive it to success. We had more students come up and ask us about our campaign than we have for any other campaign, and we saw a significant increase in social media engagement. If you haven’t cringed while reading this blog post, then you my friend may just be one of those poor souls like me that giggles incessantly at well-placed puns. Welcome to the club. |
Kristin KreherMy happiness comes from meaningful interactions, the outdoors, thrift shops, and saying "thank you." Archives
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