Session 2 - Preparing Our Ideas To Pitch Them - 03/02/12

We spent this session preparing our ideas to pitch them to media professionals.


Planning To Deliver Pitches
We worked through a work sheet to help to guide us on the structure of our pitches. There will be four different groups pitching and they will be developed into two different campaigns. One will be about drugs and the other will be about gangs.


What Do We Need To Include In Our Pitches?
1. Who are we?
- Brand values
- What brand values do we want to portray?
Branding plays a big part in any campaign especially if we want to be more respected and recognised.

2. Message
It's important to have a main message and be able to get it across as clearly as possible

3. Creating audience persona's
For this we used some paper to mind map ideas on what our audience will be like, what they are into, etc. This is useful so that we know how to make our campaign appeal more to our audience.

4. Research
- Questions that you want an answer for
It is important to do research so that we can find out who our competitors are and what has already been done.

5. What other media do our audience consume?
This will be useful so we know how to effectively communicate and share our campaigns with them.

6. Targeting or reach? entertainment or issue driven?
We need to clearly know who we are targeting, how many people we want to reach and whether or not our campaign is entertainment or issue driven.

7. 4 main competitors. What do they do well and what do they do badly?
We can learn through this both the areas that we don't want to make the same mistakes in and what works more effectively. This will help our campaign be a lot more successful.

8. What's your USP (Unique Selling Point)?
This will be the one thing that makes you stand out above the rest of the campaigns out there and make you unique.

After working on our pitches we were ready to present them to the panel. The panel were media professionals, so knew what they were talking about. We pitched to them and they gave us their feedback.

Here's how our pitches went:



Here's the feedback that we got on our pitches:



After we all received our feedback, we decided to take aspects of each of the ideas and merge them into each of the two different campaigns.

Session 1 - Introduction To Campaigning And Looking At Campaign Ideas - 27/01/12

Introductions
We kicked our first session off with introductions to everybody.

Campaign Ideas
We all discussed some ideas on what we wanted our campaign to be about:
- Drugs (cannabis is the key thing)
- Gangs
- Knives

What Has Already Been Done?
We talked about the other groups and what 'Staying Safe' campaigns that are already being done:
- An anti-knife crime play
- A mobile website to help young people get around in London
- An anti-knife crime poster
- A anti-bullying short film
- A website that teaches boys how to talk to girls

Throwing Ideas Around
We came up with an idea which we discussed in more detail to see if it would work.
The idea was about Staying safe at a party and what the main influences are:
- Alcohol
- Drugs
- Gangs
- Knife crime

The idea of a party can cover all sorts of areas.

Looking At Examples Of Innovative Campaigns
We looked at some really great campaigns that have drawn people in in a really clever way. Everyone's favourite videos were the campaigns for 'Samsung' and  'VW'.


- It's good that it's interactive but people are lazy and they won't look at it so much.


- We liked that the Voltswagen Twitter zoom campaign offered an interactive experience in the form of a ticket hunt.
- They asked people to get on their phones and follow their coordinates to go and find tickets for a gig that they were holding.
- They give people an incentive to spread the word


- To let people know that the phone's indestructible
- Smart
- It has to go viral first - it's difficult but do-able

The key of a campaign is to find out how people tick!

Looking At The Point Of Our Ideas
We discussed some more ideas in a little more detail that everybody may want to do for the campaign.
Drugs:
- The consequences and effects
- To be safe high

Knife crime:
- To the perpetrator
- 'Don't carry knives'

Gangs:
- Joint enterprise
- Prevention of joining
- Younger people - 11-19 year olds - both genders - vulnerable

We discussed the idea of squatting on other people's Facebook pages:
- Donate us your Facebook page a a certain amount of time
- Pushing for change

Some Things For Us To Consider
- Advertise it
- Arrange a small event to draw people in
- An incentive to tell everyone
- Parties mean that there is more of an opportunity to take drugs and get involved with that (this is a main issue)

Group Activity:





Finish
Everybody was asked to put together a pitch of their ideas for the next session so that we can make some decisions on what our campaign will be about.