Insider Knowlege: Advertising campaigns capstone course. Part 2
In Part 1 I re-capped the advertising campaigns course and the exciting projects that the teams presented to their agencies.
For this article, I poked Onjoli Martelly’s brain, Fringe “agency” team contact, to get more insight about Fringe’s project.
The team landed on the name Fringe after a few creative choices, like Dolphin Hammer, to stay professional. Fringe had two clients Walmart (with Saatchi & Saatchi) and Bravo Network (with 360i).
Walmart wanted a campaign for value seeking families and millennial moms to view Walmart as the hub for holiday shopping. Bravo wanted to rebrand the network to appeal to younger viewers.
To begin Fringe did secondary and primary research, mainly interviews. Using skills that they learned in Professor Sheehan’s Digital Branding and Strategy class, Fringe built ideas that would resonate with the intended target audiences. Fringe focused on making the customer the center of attention and not the client.
Fringe derived a criteria for filtering their ideas, that required a build in intensity and excitement while tying in with the central idea. After, the team would take all of the ideas and analyze them for validity, asking key questions, such as: ‘Is this viable and cost effective’; ‘Will anyone download, buy, try or keep ‘that”; ‘Does this fit into the brand image we are creating’; and ‘If you were this person, would you want this?’. These key questions helped weed out unnecessary executions, for a final streamlined concept.
While Martelly noted that this is a long process, she also acknowledged that it was essential to building a good campaign.
For the idea, Fringe had “[B]e a Holiday Hero with Walmart”. The theme was comic book/superhero where Martelly’s sister-in-laws created an actual character. For Bravo, Fringe created #CrazyDrama, which included a “crazy scale” that used Bravo star NeNe Leaks’ head as part of the “crazy barometer”, and awards for guessing how ridiculous the team ideas were. Since both of the presentations were fun and enjoyable for Martelly, she found that they were easier to memorize without being surrounded by a barrage of statistics.
Martelly, thought her teammates were awesome and self-sufficient, contributing lots of ideas for each task. Martelly also noted how useful it was to have people with different strengths on the team, citing Jen’s strength in strategy and graphic design; Dom and Jon’s media and research talents; Aidan’s research, writing and analyzing skills and her own “weird” ideas, project management skills and backup graphics knowledge.
Additionally, Martelly discovered pitching their ideas wasn’t bad and found that she could speak to the Saatchi team as peers and not superiors. She has found that “most clients don’t demand perfection in a new business pitch”; “[t]hey just want to see fresh ideas and how you think. We decided that we were going to do what we wanted and have a good time with each other instead of focusing solely on winning”.
Martello believes winning the Walmart pitch was the best part of the capstone project. Professors found the project trendy and playing to pop culture, but Saatchi picked their idea for those reasons. Fringe wanted their pitch to show what an epic and hectic time Christmas could be. Saatchi appreciated Fringe’s different take on the holiday aside from family time and Jingle Bell’s reditions.
LinkedIn - Delisa Morris
Delisa Morris is a current master's in PR candidate and third-year law student at Syracuse University. She studied political science and communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she received her bachelor's degree. Delisa is originally from Chicago.