Marketing Campaigns

You have likely heard the terms "marketing and advertising" in the same sentence and may have thought they were the same thing, but that is not a correct understanding. In fact, advertising is a vehicle for marketing strategies. 

We'll start with a broad understanding of a multimedia marketing campaign with this video, What Is A Marketing Campaign?

The video explains that a good campaign includes multiple avenues (events, social media, an app, etc.) to reach the target audience. Each of those avenues will need strategic advertising and design to provide a cohesive and enticing customer experience — drawing people in using communication techniques and design principles. 

Practising Activity – The album launch

🕔 2 or 3 days in 3-4 hour sessions per day (at least).

Create a campaign to support the launch of a new music album featuring advertising and promotions across a range of media channels. To simulate a commercial workplace or freelance job, where you won't be able to pick your subjects or assets, you'll need to generate them randomly using the links we've provided below.

Task 1: Create the product from random inputs.

1. Your band's name: the headline from Wikipedia's random article generator.
2. The album title: pick three to five words from a quote from Wikiquote's random quote generator.
3. Cover art: use one of the first six images from Flickr's Last 7 Days. 

Task 2: Create the cover art for your band's new album.

1. Use Photoshop or Illustrator
   • Image size
     • dpi 
       • 72 dpi – use this if you don't plan to print your album cover.
       • 300 dpi  – use this if you plan to create a hard copy print of your work.
     • dimensions – 600x600mm for a standard album cover.
2. Identify a target audience, use the InDesign Persona template that you have already saved, or download it (and unzip it) now.
3. Consider that audience when choosing fonts and colours.
4. Use communication techniques (composition, emotional tactics in your composition).

Here are some examples from previous students:

Task 3: Create promotional advertising for a launch event.

1. Create an A3 poster promoting an event celebrating your album's release.
   • Be sure to include the event name, time, date, and venue.
   • Export it to print as a PDF. If you plan to actually print it, don't forget to set the dpi to 300. Otherwise, 72 is good. 
2. Create two smaller versions of the ad that would be placed in a magazine. 
   • One should be portrait orientated
   • One should be landscape orientated
   • Remember to consider the readability of the text at a smaller scale.
3. Place your two smaller versions into mockup magazine layouts

Check out the examples from one of our previous students:

	The poster mocked up as if it was printed and posted in town.
The advertisement above, shown to the right, is mocked up as part of a magazine ad layout.

Task 4: Design your social media marketing presence

Go back to the target audience you identified at the beginning of this activity and design ads that target your audience. Consider different ads for the different groups of target audiences. You may have 20-40 as an age range, but you know that what appeals to a 20-year-old may be different to a 40-year-old. 

Use this page of insights from SproutSocial.com to do some research about strategy and dimensions and then:

1. Create a chain of ads for Instagram, including gifs
2. Create a Facebook campaign

Check out the work of our previous students by expanding the label below.

Social Media Ad Campaign Examples

Task 5: Digital Promotion

For this final task, you will need to do some research of your own about animated adverts on web pages. 

1. Go back to your target audience again and determine which websites would most suit advertising your album launch.
2. Look into those websites to find their advertisement guidelines and use the dimensions and size limits they require to create advertisements that will be accepted.
3. Create a storyboard for your animations and plan how you will develop them.
4. Use Adobe Animate to create a range of animated adverts.
5. Do the research and planning on at least three different websites to reach three different target groups. If you run low on time, you don't have to complete more than one actual artwork. 

Check out this example:

Forum Post

1. Create your Forum post and upload the:
   • album cover
   • poster
   • two advertisement mockups
   • digital promotion animation(s)
2. Along with your work, answer these questions:
   • What do you think was the purpose of this activity?
   • Will anything you learned in this topic help you create better designs? If so, what and why?
   • Did you seek feedback while developing your designs? Did you consider it? If not why not?  
   • What other reflections would you like to share with your peers and tutor?

Tino pai! Good job completing another practising activity - this one was a big one!