Personal+Branding



"The man who stops advertising to save money is like the man who stops the clock to save time"  ~ Thomas Jefferson

I believe this quote to be the basis to any advertising and marketing. Now in my third year, going into my final year at University of Toronto, I know what my interests are and in what direction I want my career to be heading. I have been attracted to the area of advertising and marketing for some time now, and have spent the last three years attending relevant internships in order to build experiences in this field. Naturally, taking this course is a no-brainer. This course has not only been a learning experience but has also helped to solidify information previously acquired from other media courses and internships. Unlike most other classes, I enjoyed all the work assigned to us in CCT356. I am eager to expand my knowledge in this field and am passionate about learning advertising and marketing practices: to develop my skills especially in graphic designing, strategic planning and project management.

   The first assignment involved critiquing two existing online advertising/marketing campaigns of my choice. I decided to pick two campaigns I thought were very successful**:** ** Calvin Klein X - Mark Your Spot Ad Campaign and Travelocity on Chatroulette. Both companies have a lot of competition in a very large market, struggling to raise brand awareness. Accordingly, I ** ** examined the two company’s design and approach, figure out their target audience, their advances and objectives, advertising techniques utilized and level of successful. **During the process of discussing the use of campaign tactics, I was able to apply what I learnt from this course, or rather how companies applied the strategy of theories I learnt in class. After critiquing, I was able to clearly see both the successful traits and flaws of each design campaign. This is insightful as before this assignment I was only able to pinpoint the effective aspects of both the campaigns. In addition, this assignment has helped me acknowledge the different strategies companies can and will use to attract attention e.g. explicit sexual messages. Without a doubt, the online advertising critique has helped me grasp the important rubric of marketing strategies.

 For assignment two, we were required to create an online ad campaign for a client. This client may be real or fabricated. Three different ad designs in three different online forms were to shape our campaign, as well as a brief write-up. I chose to construct my online advertising campaign around a flower boutique I named “Chelsea Garden”. The name is derived from the most famous flower show in the United Kingdom, which is held in Chelsea Garden. I decided to focus on designing for a flower boutique because I notice the shortage of advertising for this market in the virtual world – it is not very often we come across an ad documenting flowers. Having just come back from a holiday, my boyfriend greeted me at the airport with a dozen roses in hand. This made me realize the importance of flowers as a product – it is so high in demand, yet where are the campaigns? This led me to photograph my roses and create my own full banners, vertical towers and buttons. The questions i considered before creating my ads include my company's objectives and target audience. This assignment and the creation of my advertisements proved to be quite challenging and extremely time consuming, which I think perfectly reflects the process of a real campaign done by professionals in the work field. Although it may seem very straight forward, campaigns take a lot of thought and efforts, always more than expected. I recall working in the marketing department at my internship last summer with the bank HSBC, the procedure of the creation of adverts was tedious, rigorous and laborious. Yet, customers don’t realize this. They simply skim the ads or completely ignore them. From this assignment, I feel like I can relate it to the real world as well as use my existing knowledge from this course and from assignment 1 to generate the best campaign I can.

 The third assignment entailed working in a group to create an online campaign for a **real** client. The process of our campaign consisted of 5 steps as discussed in class, considering strategies such as the marketing mix (the 4Ps’), S.M.A.R.T and the S.W.O.T analysis. For this project my roommate gave me permission to create a campaign for his online clothing store called SHOWKINGSHOP. Established in the fall of 2009, SHOWKINGSHOP originally started out as a Facebook Group Seller and is founded by students and made for students. Due to growing popular demand, SHOWKINGSHOP was able to expand into its own website and join the e-commerce industry based in Canada. Now an independent shop, they offer their own range of most current fashion items as well as exclusive suppliers from South Korea spanning from clothing to accessories and footwear at the greatest value. I worked in a group of 5 and we decided to split the work equally 5 ways in form of the 5 steps or stages. Our group worked well, feeding information and ideas off each other effectively and constructed our campaign without any problems. This project provided a real life experience of working in a team within a company to best implement ideas and manage group dynamics at the same time. It helped me learn how to conduct a campaign as a group and also learn the importance of the other aspects that surround a campaign such as background and research.

** In hindsight, taking this course has been invaluable to me considering my intentions of working in this particular field. To summarize: **  **What have I gained or learned from this course?** ** Being in the Communications, Culture and Information Technology major, I am aware of how powerful the Internet can be as a dominant technology in contemporary society. This course has further highlighted to me the importance of online presence. The Internet is a very powerful tool – it is changing concepts in **space, time, perfection and social aspects, and of course it is also changing concepts in the nature of advertising and marketing. The virtual world has provided us with an entity that acts as a more effective advertising mechanism. Therefore, we must fully engage and utilize the whole nature of the Internet in order to compete, by being able to identify common areas of concern in creating online advertising and marketing efforts, being able to critique, research and identify components of an online advertising and marketing strategy.

 **Inspiration?** <span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">** Through our daily lives, we are continuously branding ourselves, whether subconsciously or not. By purchasing certain clothes, you are branding yourself a certain way. By choosing or making certain choices, you are branding yourself with that decision. Branding is simply a social consensus and an integral part of our lives. If so, then the nature and existence of advertising and marketing should not be undermined. After all, branding is the basis of advertising and marketing. ** <span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">**Issues and Challenges?** <span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">Issues and challenges I experienced were generally technological. I found majority of the course content pretty straight forward and it was mainly the creation of designs that I found tricky. However, it did not pose as a major problem and I found the end results satisfying and rewarding.