First Advertising class

  Today was my first Advertising class. I truly admire our instructor, an elegant half Egyptian half Argentinean, She is very experienced, she worked in both the Agency and the client so I guess I'll be having loads of fun.

 The class started by asking as a question, Do you think Creativity is a talent or learned? My opinion was that All of us were born creative but we lose creativity because of education& culture. Creativity can be refreshed through practicing. Her opinion was that Creativity is a talent and that it can be learned but it won't be as much as those guys who was born creative.

Then she asked us what is the difference between a product and a brand? a lot of answers some were wrong and some were right, some of the answers were that blue jeans is a product, Calvin Klein is a brand. And that not all of products has a brand.

Then we moved to basic guidelines for Advertising, First is that there is no good or bad advertisement, but there's an effective or memorable or a persuasive advertisement.

Second Who is the responsible of the ineffective ad? well It is the client, because the client is the one who plans for the whole marketing campaign, he is the one who explains his strategy and his product and what kind of message he wants to deliver to the ad agency and he's the one who approves on the execution of the advertisement.

Third point, is that there's no rules in Advertising except the science, when I think about this point I see that there's basic rules to follow or to consider when designing for example the logo should be clear on the printed ad or that there shouldn’t be much of information on the billboard.

Fourth point is that don't be BORING or ordinary which in my point of view it is a mistake most of companies fall into, such as detergents commercials are always dividing the screen into a white glowing shirt using their detergent while a yellow shirt using the competitor's detergent.

Fifth point is that advertisements are not measurable and that financial managers are always opposing the cost of the ads but when the ad is not effective they aren't the main reasons to blame.

Sixth point which is extremely important is to have objective, objective in what is the message conveying the ad and what are the expected outputs from that advertisement (increasing sales or responding to a special offer)

Seventh point is about Testing your ad, testing is extremely costing from selecting your focus group and applying testing procedures itself but it is important to do another problem is that people tend to be not honest for most of the time. A case study she told us about, They set a group of people, put the tested ads in the middle of a magazine and they kept observing whether the tested act will attract their attention or not and for how long will they stay to stare at the printed ad and after a week they asked them which ad they remembered the most from the magazine.
Another case study of product testing and researching, they carried two photos in the street one for a hot Blondie wearing fashion trending clothes and the other was for a fat woman and they asked people what do you expect the Blondie is shopping from and where from the fat woman is shopping? Most of the answers for the latest question went for a certain brand whom they were testing for. So they included that brand’s weakness that it isn't fashionable and people wear from it because it sells big sizes.

Eighth point is extremely important is that people tend to mix between familiarity and quality, that as long as the products are familiar, they are of a good quality. There’s a lot of food with good quality but aren’t familiar. For example when it comes to food quality is measured by a taste, me myself love a certain type of Tuna called ‘Boustany’ it isn’t familiar and a lot of people don’t like it but I think that it is delicious and underrated.

El Rasheedy El mizan case study: El Rasheedy Elmizan has a low market share measured 10%, their targent was not to increase their market share but to increase Jam’s consumers as people tend not to eat a lot of Jam. So they launched their famous jingle in Ramadan. It was very successful campaign that people recognized the name of the brand.

By the end of that fruitful session, The instructor gave us an assignment which is supposed to be the whole course project, we should pick up a product and do researches, design a press ad and to prepare a report with the ad.