We Came. We Saw. We Learned.

Newhouse’s graduate class in advertising took their second trip to the Big Apple for a workshop designed by the award-winning digital agency, 360i. After taking a quick tour of the office, we sat in a short presentation by Mark Avnet where we learned about 360i’s culture and some of their success stories. Through one of their approaches was the foundation of our workshop assignment. Our group was set up in to three teams each representing three real clients of the agency. Our goal was to formulate a way to gather real-time data points with our limitless budget and decide how we would execute a campaign relevant to the brand and its consumers.

How my team broke up our time:

• 10-noon: We took the three main elements of the brief and listed them on the board. In order to stay on track of what was expected from us, we went top to bottom in the order it was given to us. Aside from this, we knew it’s a reflex move to want to jump right into creative. So, to combat this we decided to write down all of our ideas and keywords to keep in mind, but be able to free ourselves up to new ideas knowing that others were aware of more possibilities. From there, we listed out what our brand’s goal was, what issues we could run in to, and who our targets were. We ended up with three possible targets: friends, couples, and singles and of the six of us, two were each assigned a target to come up with a consumer journey and persona.

• Noon-12:45: Lunch time!

• 12:45-3:45: With our decided target we drew out a more detailed plan of where they were going to be, how we would market to them, what we wanted from them, and other ways of getting them engaged in case they did not interact with the first part of the campaign. We put together a presentation and filed in to the training room to present to Mark Avnet, dean of 360i’s educational center, and a few other employees who currently work on our chosen brands and could offer advice after we presented.

• After each presentation we were given feedback on what went well and what could be improved upon. Different points were touched upon such as SEO comments, strategy, media planning/buying, and the overall concept. Once all three teams presented, Brad Alperin, VP Strategy of 360i, wrapped up our experience with a mini lesson on storytelling and making sure there is a thread of connection between all the parts within your pitch.

 

I feel incredibly lucky to have taken part in this workshop with my class, and there was more to take away from it than is listed in this post.