I was contacted by Neil Pritchard, Glyndwr Careers Service, to take part in the marketing strategy for Creative Futures Week. The organising committee want to include a student in the process and are keen to devise a strategy that engages all art and design students in a way that last year's poster campaign failed to achieve. The time scale is fairly tight in that the design has to be created and produced within 3 to 4 weeks, with Christmas plum in the middle. If possible the strategy is also to operate in a number of formats; print, phone text, web and electronic flyer.
I played around with symbolism and metaphors relating to the future and its prediction and tried to combine or manipulate symbols to witty effect. I produced four draft ideas to pitch to Neil.
The strongest, in my mind, and the one that Neil and I are most interested in pursuing is shown above. Here's the rationale:
All students face choices surrounding their futures, and choice is at the heart of the concept here: you can take a considered and constructive view of future plans or you can leave your future to chance.
As one part of a direct marketing strategy all eligible students will be offered an A6, folded to A7, card containing a tea bag. The message contained plays on the idea that you can either take a kind of mystical approach to the future, or you can take control - by engaging in Creative Futures Week. You can also have a cuppa too.
The artwork supplied is by no means in finished form and will need to carry additional information such as Welsh language equivalents. I would also like to illustrate the six stage process using ‘first aid’ style diagrams. The campaign could be further enhanced by an animated web link, electronic flyers and guerilla style tea bag stickers placed in strategic locations.
The strategy is quirky, direct and personal. It also avoids reliance on poster advertising where there is fierce competition and a tendency for it all to become ‘wallpaper’.
Neil and I also considered the use of a tea bag with string and tag as a means to reduce materials and costs but considered the amount of space available for text on a tag prohibitive. It could be a nice teaser but would require further marketing materials to then place the idea in context. There would always be a risk that the audience would become too perplexed or wouldn’t then be exposed to the following stage that started to make sense of it all.
Anyway, when you put your mind to it, tea has lots of possibilities. It’s the future.
Alternative ideas were essentially poster oriented. The above plays on retro ideas about the future and the image of a stylised robot holding a paintbrush is mildly amusing and quirky. Below is an illustrative solution that I really enjoyed creating and which plays on the idea of being creative with the future - the characters are engaged in manipulating the calendar to their own chaotic ends.
The final idea is a metaphorical representation of the future, the gently blurring dots indicating a kind of succession or passage onwards. This is possibly the weakest of the presented ideas.
The problem with all these poster related ideas is their indiscriminate effect made worse by the competition they face from a multitude of other posters. The tea bag idea is direct and also promotes a fairly serious message: if you want, you can be proactive when it comes to your own future.
I can't say that I'm really enjoying this, I think it's the intricacies of dealing with a committee and also the target audience being my peers - a savvy and demanding lot.
