Boosts Current Campaign

Given in the project pack was boosts current ad campaign which comes from a satirical and comedic point of view, which for some may work but im personally not keen. It feels like they are trying to hard to be a young 'cool' brand and I see this as the reason they have set females as the key target audience for this project. Because this 'Boost up yourself' campaign would not have appealed to females at all in my opinion. Part of this is the whole "boostism" concept they use in the campaign, in there own words these are bravado-fuelled statements which would appeal a lot more to men then women particularly the statements they use and the photos. 

For example this advert "Boost dropkicks tired in the face" is one of their pieces in the 'boost-up yourself' campaign. Which as I mentioned uses their 'boostism' concept which sticks to the brand as in there own words they are a fun, youthful and energetic company. 

My aim is to produce a more mature campaign that does not alienate the core audience of boost and also atrracts women to the product as stated on the brief.

Pitch

Today I pitched my ideas for the boost project to the class and got some really good responses and feedback. Overall the idea of the two drinks with two distinct effects was a succes and the ideas around advertising these were generally received with good feedback, a couple of the ideas I was experimenting with were discussed and I was swayed off using these in the final product.

Points to work on -

• Makes ads appear more natural
• Lose neon theme and go for softer natural colours
• Change the speedometer as too manly 

So the pitch was really helpful and gave me a good direction with my work and also helped me finalise ideas and themes. From here I think I need to rework my mock-up trying to improve on the points listed above. 

Choosing Boost

I have decided to change my brief from LTA British Tennis to Boost I did this because after reading through them again I feel that the boost brief is a much more exciting challenge. It has a lot more freedom and lets you create your own product and basically just run with it making a whole launch campaign. This really appealed to me and it's something I thought I could really get stuck into. 

The Brief  - 

So the brief for this project is too essentially create a new water and vitamin drink for the company boost. The first step is to pick and choose the ingredients used in the drinks this can up to six different flavours from here they want a campaign that launches this product range 'bringing it to life and showing the benefits of the drink'. 

The mandatories for the project as laid out by the brief is a name for the product, packaging design as well as an art direction and a copy for the campaign. Furthermore it lists press advertising, packaging designs, point-of-sale, sampling ideas and digital assets  to be clear on what is required for the project. 

The brief also states that you can follow on from the provided ad campaign 'boost yourself up' however this is not required and it goes onto say that you should not feel restricted by this. 

The target audience given in the brief is 'health aware 16-25 year old female market' highlighting that they are not obsessed with going to the gym or a healthy lifestyle but are aware of choosing products with natural health benefits. However as well as this they do not want to alienate there core market of 16-25 year old males. 

Next Steps - 

My step steps in this project will be to look at and decide on the flavours of the drinks that I want my product range to feature. From here I can look at the health benefits of this and start coming up with the campaign for this. 

TennIS Posters

The brief came with the posters from the LTA's tennis is campaign which was mentioned in the brief under useful information. The campaign uses the is at the end of tennis to lead on to the rest of the slogan, the 'is' is highlighted through the use of a different colour. This makes it easy to understand the concept of the campaign to viewers, the messages given through the adverts change and each one has it's own target audience. 

As you can see the adverts target families, people wanting to lose weight, old people and people in high stress or demanding jobs. The posters are good and I think the main taglines are clever and the messages sent out are very positive about tennis. For my work these posters could be used depending on the idea and concept I decide on, and whilst these do show the range of who tennis can be good for I could rework the general concept to work for the target audience of women as taken from the LTA brief. 

Coffee vs Tennis

From the list of YCN briefs the two that appealed to me most were the LTA British Tennis brief and the Nescafe Azera brief. 

LTA Brief - The key part of the LTA brief is to get more women in the uk playing tennis, once you get into the actual brief the target audience is very clear and precise. The 'creative challenged' is explained and clear in that you have to create a campaign to increase awareness of the benefits of tennis to women. More precise than this they want to target women they describe as Lapsed players (i.e. they used to play a lot but not anymore) or infrequent players (i.e. they play a bit in the summer) It also lays out what it thinks will be the key barriers for the the campaign to overcome and the key motivators the campaign can use. As well as this the brief states that I could use any medium or combination of media to create the campaign. 

Nescafe Brief - The Nescafe brief is about creating a new product innovation for the Nescafe Azera range. The brief lists out the 'creative challenge' in three main points first of it explains that you have to come up with a new idea for the Azera range which can be a tweak or a revolution. The second point is that they want you to launch a social media campaign to launch the new product innovation and finally they want to know how it would stand out in-store. The target audience is described by the brief not as much detail is given as the LTA brief but it describes them in relation to coffee.

YCN Project - The Briefs

For this next project I have been given the freedom to choose my own brief from a list on the YCN website. This is for the YCN student awards which it is recommended I enter this deadline is the 27th March whilst the internal deadline is the 10th of February.  The project has a wide range of companies to choose from ranging from Dominoes to the Royal Albert Hall then each of these has a their own brief and desired outcomes. For example Dominoes want to 'reassert there ownership over tuesdays' whilst the Royal Albert Hall want to raise the awareness of their charity work. 

Looking through the briefs there not one that really stands out to me as something I must do, however there are a couple that I like the sound of. So researching these further and brainstorming ideas will hopefully give me some direction for the project. 

From here I must prepare a pitch for the 20th Jan and be ready to crit on the 5th Feb, also as part of the project I will travel to YCN in London to discuss the briefs and more. Overall I think once I have chosen a brief and have an idea that this will be a good project. 

Restricting The Game

After having some trouble designing the game graphics to a level where I was happy with them I decided to experiment and add some rules for myself. I thought if I added some boundaries for myself to stay in I would be able to design something that was more simple than my previous artwork but was also much more stronger visually.  

The rules that I decided to stick too was -

• The use of only 4 colours - Black, dark grey, light grey, green
• No backgrounds

Whilst being simple things I found it a lot easier to create my artwork following these two rules, the four colours all mix together well and with the use of strokes in the artwork I think the colour scheme is actually quite strong and each of the elements has it's own colour code. For example the users weapon and controls are all coloured in light grey with a stroke of green whilst the enemy are dark grey with a stroke of black. This broke up the different parts of the game like I mentioned but also because the colours all work well together these different elements come together and do not look disjointed or out of place. 

Using no backgrounds also gave me one less thing to worry about, in my previous attempts and the game artwork or even the game ideas I found myself thinking what sort of background I need to use and how detailed it should be. The idea of no backgrounds free'd me in a way as it meant I could draw all of the other elements in the same way without thinking about how detailed the background needed to be or what perspective it needed to be in. In the end I actually think having no background works well and is not too simple or out of place, and whilst the game may have looked better with one i'm happy with the result form sticking to the two rules I had set out. 

This method of restricting myself really helped me push on with the designing of my game which I had been stuck on for some time. It is an idea I will look to use in the future if I am in a similar situation.