Creative Brain: Advertising with Engineers
In the advertising program, we learn a lot about brands advertising to consumers. We spend a lot of time learning how to market to the typical consumer: someone in a grocery store making a purchase or someone choosing between restaurants. We had not talked about business-to-business advertising very much until last week.
Business-to-business, or B2B, advertising is just what it sounds like. There are plenty of businesses selling their products to other businesses. Some common B2B advertisers are insurance, software or server companies or financial advising. The advertising is typically perceived as boring, especially in comparison to the consumer ads we see every day. B2B advertising doesn’t have to be boring, but as a student working on a project, selling snacks sounds more interesting then selling software.
Professor Kevin O’Neill teaches a required course called Creative Brain in the spring for advertising graduate students. The class discusses and covers the creative process in developing advertising ideas. There are smaller assignments distributed throughout the semester that involve creating ideas or wireframes for television commercials, radio ads, outdoor displays and other mediums, but in the last few weeks, we’ve been divided into groups and started our major assignment.
For the past five years, the advertising graduate program has been pairing up with the capstone class for undergraduate engineers. During an undergraduate engineering student’s senior year they begin and complete their capstone projects. Beginning in the fall, they are divided into teams of five and each team is presented with a problem or competition to solve over the course of the semester. During the spring semester, they build prototypes of their designs and attempt any last minute changes.
Many of the engineering teams are working on products that aren’t directly sold to consumers. All of the products are things that will be of interest to businesses to either use or sell to consumers.
What the partnership does is match up an engineering team with an advertising team. My group in particular is working with a team developing a more customizable wheelchair locking system, so that wheelchair users can more easily drive. A lot of its importance comes from giving wheelchair users more independence. This particular project isn’t installable by a consumer, so it needs to be sold to a business instead.
As advertisers, it’s our job to determine how we market the product, who we market to and what would convince people that this works better than what already exists. Of course there are many more factors, but that’s the basic breakdown.
It’s been really interesting to work with a team of people who know the product so well because they’ve designed and developed it from conception. It’s also nice to be able to work with people outside of Newhouse. Sometimes, I never get the time or take the time to step outside of the physical Newhouse building as a graduate student. The project lasts the entirety of the spring semester and I’m excited to see how we tie everything together.
