Lo3 - Evaluate how the created materials meet the technical and aesthetic requirements of clients brief

The brief given to me and my partner by our client Cancer Alliance was: to create a campaign for young carers who are caring for family members suffering with cancer. This was to be done in order to make young carers reach out and contact Cancer Alliance by sharing their story. Cancer Alliance wanted to hear feedback from people who had seen cancer care first hand and they wanted to hear their constructive criticism for the future when working with similar patients. 

To start this campaign I looked into all the different media channels regarding where I could distribute my campaign  and have decided to use blended marketing, meaning our campaign will be distributed through both traditional and digital platforms. Our chosen channels are social media platforms such as Instagram, print based posters and our clients Cancer Alliance website. This is due to the fact that our target audience ranges from 12-25 which is quite large in range, making our target audience consist of both digital natives and millennials. Therefore, we wanted to have the campaign on platforms that everyone within our target audience audience would see, for example, the younger half of our audience (12-18) would most likely see the campaign digitally since they're digital natives and therefore typically on their phone a lot, which is why we wanted to upload to campaign to web and social media photo and video sharing networks such as Instagram, since this is a very popular platform that most teenagers and kids use daily, increasing the chances of our campaign reaching the audience. The older half of our audience (19-25), despite most likely also being on this app, might not use it as much as they're most likely at work and uni most of the time, therefore, to increase the chances of them seeing the campaign, we wanted to have it physically put up in popular destinations for people within the ages 19-25 such as in gym changing rooms and bus stops. We found these locations to be ideal as most young adults go to the gym and use busses as driving a car to uni and into town is expensive due to parking. Therefore, meeting on of the technical aspects of my clients brief since the main purpose of the campaign was to reach young people, which these platforms allow me to do. Our target audience would typically be of the NRS C2DE social grade since the reason young people care for their parents is typically because a carer or additional treatment cannot be afforded, therefore placing the posters in locations such as bus stops helps us reach this audience as public transport is a cheap option for travelling. 

Initially the posters that we wanted to make were going to be hand draw by myself in order to connote a feel of authenticity and a genuine message as it seems more personal to the audience which is ideal when trying to get in contact with young people on a sensitive and private subject matter. However, after creating visualisation diagrams and scanning them in digitally we came to the conclusion that because we are working with a real life, large company we wanted to demonstrate our digital media skills to show how we care professional and employer-ready. Therefore, we weren't happy with the hand draw posters as they looked cheap and unrealistic in comparison to real campaign examples. Consequently, we came up with the idea to write a checklist that a young carer would write in order to remember to do tasks related to caring for their parent / guardian. We decided to do this through Adobe Photoshop using a graphics tablet and a free for use image of plain paper as the foundation to write on. We found this to be much more visually appealing and started sending our drafts to our client Cancer Alliance in order to gain feedback, they told us that it was unrealistic due to the tasks written on the list as a young carer wouldn't typically be able to go to the cinema with their friends, in general it wasn't ideally fitting the brief.  We tried the approach of using an actual mobile phone using the notes and reminders apps in order to type up a checklist and applied the screenshot of the list to a free for use mock-up of a mobile phone. This approach allowed our campaign to more specifically reach our digital native target audience since a mobile phone is something that they'd use to write checklist on rather than a pen and paper due to technological convergence and convenience, a theory by Henry Jenkins 2008. Therefore making the content more relatable and appealing to our audience. We used software such as Adobe Photoshop on in order to add the cancer alliance logo, banners and text to the poster. Overall its denotation was pleasing however we found that the text on the screen was too small to see and therefore wasn't useable. 

After changing this advert layout multiple times using different mock ups and approaches we decided to try a completely new idea. This idea revolved around an ill mum and their young carer having a text conversation about how they've ordered her pills and is overall demonstrating activities that are conventionally expected of a parent to be doing - rather than a child, such as: picking up their younger siblings from school and calculating the council tax. We took the screenshot of the text converation into Adobe Photoshop and added our logo, main text and slogan. After going back and fourth making adjustments through sending drafts to our client and gaining feedback we came to the design that we would use for the final poster and would later use to inspire our social media posts. 

We decided on this poster to be our finalised version due to the fact that it allowed us to reach our target audience, meet our brief with a happy client and address the subject matter in a suitable way. For example, the denoted house style colours consisted of mainly black and which are gender neutral colours, allowing our advert to appeal to our target audience of both males and females. However, colours such as blue are also prominent as this colour is used to represent imessages, this became a concern because blue is stereotypically associated with being a colour that appeals to males rather than females. However, we decided to leave the text blue since both males and females typically see this denotation of a text screen everyday and therefore the poster would still be relateable and intriguing despite the use of the blue colour. Secondly, the fact that the poster was based on a text conversation allowed it to appeal to our digital native 12-25 target audience as technology is a part of their everyday lives therefore making the poster relateable. The use of gender neutral, plain colours helped represent the sensitive subject matter as these colours have no elaborate connotations or associations in comparison to colours such as yellow which connote emotions such as excitement and happiness. Therefore overall meeting our clients brief. 

Our second set of adverts were to be uploaded to the Cancer Alliance website and to social media platforms such as Instagram, a photo and video sharing social network. This was to be used as our main social media channel, consequently each advert was tailored to fit both the layout and aesthetic of Instagram. We found it important for there to be a use of synergy between the traditional and digital adverts as we wanted to create a strong brand name and representation plus demonstrate our blended marketing. Therefore we created 5 more additional text conversations again demonstrating conversations that aren't conventional between not only a young carer and his parents but also his friends and other family relatives in order to show that it impacts most of their other relationships and show the constraints that they have to deal with on a daily basis. We think that these set of adverts were effective as they really show our target audience that we understand what they're going through meaning hopefully they will appreciate the campaign and try to get in contact with our client, meeting our brief. Our adverts will be uploaded to the cancer alliance website which means our target audience of young carers will be easily reached as people struggling with these issues are the primary audience demographic visiting websites such as our clients. However, we did understand that some ethical issues may come with this release as not all young carers want others to know that they experience a different childhood to other kids due to bullying and being left out, which is why we wanted to attempt to more specifically target it towards our audience though the web 2.0 / 3.0 using analytics and specifically reaching young carers only, although this obviously can't be something that's done for sure due to funds and limitations as to who we can reach. These adverts were uploaded to the Cancer Alliance Instagram account, showing that our client was happy with it and clearly meeting their brief. 


Lastly we created an audio visual advertisement using the screen recording effect on the iPhone and typing out a list into the notes app, ticking different tasks of. This idea originated from our initial digital idea about having a checklist, we decided to keep it as we thought it would be smart to try and reach our audience from two different approaches and measure which gains the most recognition. We then took this footage and edited it in Adobe Premier where the logo, main text, contact information and sound effects were all composted together through different slides. I think that this audio visual looked very realistic and professional since most adverts of this genre addressing sensitive subject matters conventionally show text over different slides in order to break the information show and create a kind, friendly approach to the audience. Again gender neutral colours were main focus in order to show synergy and brand recognition along side keeping our audience of both males and females intrigued. All adverts included the use of the #MAKEYOURVOICEHEARD hashtag, demonstrating folksonomy and allowing our audience to communicate though an electronic agora, this is beneficial as it encourages young carers to talk to each other and get in contact with us which helps us meet our brief. Overall I'm extremely happy with the outcome of mine and my partner Mia Fidment's campaign for our client Cancer Alliance as they will be proudly using it as real campaign showing us that we have clearly met their brief.