Thursday 26 March 2009

A facebook quizz!

We had a facebook group from the beginning of the campaign, and let's be honest, facebook is kind of a must-have if you are targeting students today. However, most of academic research has shown that the presence of companies and brands on social networking websites may be seen as very intrusive by some people. The fact is, if a company is on facebook, it has to play by the (tacit) rules of facebook. It has to engage with people and most of the time on a non-commercial basis.

Obviously this is a long-term, expensive, no direct-ROI strategy. But is there really a choice?

In the context of our campaign, we had to offer something to our facebook group members. Something that was absolutely not part of our assignment, and something that was just fun for the sake of it. We designed a little quizz. We had fun designing it and we hope it shows when taking it.

If you want to have a go click here.

Wednesday 18 March 2009

Smarter than the flyer?

Flyers are a scarce ressource, we only had about 3000 and have used most of them. What do we do next? We had no budget to print some more and more importantly, we were not really convinced of the real impact the flyers were having.

Stamp the message! We bought a very simple stamp online and got it delivered a couple of days ago. And the result is not bad, see it for yourself.

At least with a stamp you are sure the people are not gonna lose the message and it introduces some dimensiosn of "permission marketing" as you have to make sure the people agree to get the communication stamped on them.

Friday 13 March 2009

£1000 and superstitions


Remember you can win a £1000 if you register online using the reference code 13. And, what a great coincidence: today is Friday the 13th! whooo... creepy atmosphere...

Now the question is: will you dare to sign up now?

Click on the picture and enter you lucky number 13!

Thursday 12 March 2009

Follow us on twitter!

For those not familiar with the social networking websites, or those who need some reliable statistics to put in a uni coursework, here's a sweet little report from Nielsen.

And by the way, we'd be delighted if you were following us on Twitter, the fastest growing networking site.

Real time updates about the campaign, the big achievements, the big flops, the reactions from people, it's all happening here.

Wednesday 11 March 2009

Did You Know?

I was doing some basic market research on students when i came across these striking statistics:

Total number of students in Scotland: roughly 126000
Number of female students in Scotland: roughly 72500
Number of male students in Scotland: roughly 53500

Yes! That's a lot more girls than boys... Which is good news for single boys. Now that also means a marketing communications campaign targeted to Scottish students is targeted to a 60%-female-audience and should be designed accordingly.

These figures come from a HESA publications from 2007 and are the latest available.

Tuesday 10 March 2009

Guerilla Marketing - The Banned Campaign

We created our first posters today! There designed to be placed on the University campus, and especially in the library. We decided to use some sort of guerilla technique to grab more attention to our message.

Here’s the plan:

You know those signs that say “Turn It Off” urging you to turn off your mobile phone? There’s something about them, they are horribly bad looking but we can’t help noticing them, so we really wanted to use them. That’s when we came out with the “Turn Her On” slogan to support our Page-3-style poster.

For obvious reasons, we could not let the posters there and we had to take them down. However, we had the time to take a few pictures for your eyes only. Enjoy!


You too want to be in and have a chance to win £1000? Click here.

Monday 9 March 2009

Free Entry Competition - The Flyer

Here's one of the flyers we are going to hand out in the next few weeks. They have been provided to us by The Scottish Sun. They're not the most beautiful flyers ever but they're decent and very simple to understand, and after all, that's all you ask a flyer, isn't it?

Who wants to win a £1000?

One of the core elements of the Scottish Sun’s new campaign is an online competition. There are five prizes of £1000 to be won and it’s fairly straightforward; students just have to enter some basic details in order to participate (name, address, e-mail address, date of birth…). The reference code is 13.

To enter the competition, click on this link.

I registered obviously; a grand would be just perfect right now! (When is a grand not perfect?) I don’t know what the Scottish Sun is going to do with my details but I expect them to send me some sort of newsletter, or promotions e-mail sometime.

Now it’s quite striking how this campaign seems to be inspired by what the First did at the beginning of the academic year 2008. Same target, same online prize draw, same £1000 reward. It’s like there was a special recipe to attract students! Nevertheless, I think the Sun is quite sincere in its commitment toward students and I especially like the fact that this campaign is run by students for students.

Now next step is to find ways to direct students towards this competition and we have a few ideas of posters, videos, and other things that I will post in the future on this blog. I think we’ll have a few laughs honestly.

Thursday 5 March 2009

It always start with a new logo...

Hi everyone, my name is Alex and I'm a Marketing student at University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. I am currently working on a project with the Scottish Sun (News International) and the agency DADA. It's called the Student Project and basically, it's about designing a communications campaign for the Sun to engage with students.

The cool part is that it's always nice to work on real projects when you're at uni, you know there is so much theory down here. On the other hand, I have to admit I've never read tabloids and it's a pretty daunting feeling to start working on something you absolutely don't know. So that's gonna be a weird and hopefully interesting journey. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna learn a lot.

So to begin, I just tried to design a new logo for the Scottish Sun. No big change, just trying to rejuvenate it a wee bit. I know changing a logo is not always the best strategic choice and can often be very expensive for very little returns (see what Pepsi did in the US...), but I just mean this as an experiment, and it's such good fun.


You can see the actual logo on their website. And here's mine:






See, I told you. No big change...but I kinda like it this way. Well to be honest this is not even part of my assignment, and I know I'm getting distracted, next post will be more serious. Or maybe not.

Oh and please feel free to give comments and feedback on the logo.