Proposal

It took me a while to put the my proposed theories in a logical order, but here it is- the proposal!


Concept
The main aim is to produce an online advertising campaign. We want to advertise the idea of transience. Using various digital media tools we aim to make our website interactive so that the audience could get involved with our final product. In order to encourage traffic to our website we will attempt to use other media as well such as wiki, social networking sites, e-mail, posters.
About the company
Our company is called GHERKIN PRODUCTIONS. It is vital to stress that the name is not related in any way to the product. The evolution of ideas can be observed at our blog (http://gherkinproductions.blogspot.com/) where we regularly post our research and findings.


Inspirations
There are three main sources of inspirations for our project.
Firstly, we want to relate to the fast development of the Internet and its impact on the life of society (Meyers and Gerstman, 2001). As a result of the technological progress also the future of advertising lays online. According to Henry Jenkins (2006) the traditional media lost their power to attract the consumers and the companies have now placed an emphasis on the Internet to advertise their products. Jenkins mentioned Coca Cola consumers who used the Internet as a platform for sharing their own personal stories about the product. We also want to create a space for interaction.
Secondly, as Gavin Lucas and Michael Dorrian (2006) stated, the media landscape has changed over the last few years and became more interactive and audience involving. As a result, the consumers are now invited to take part in “something relatively new between the advertiser and consumer: a conversation” (Lucas and Dorrian, 2006:18). More and more brands become interactive platforms for their customers to discuss the product like in case Apple (Interbrand, 2009). Our project is informed by the idea that “creating a brand, and designing the service behind it are becoming inseparable” (Wolff Olins, 2008). We want our audience to be able to engage with our ideas and be able to play and customise our logo.
Finally, we want to play with the theories of culture jamming and subversive advertising. As informed by the Adbusters (2008) and Lasn (2000) we aim to use the idea that advertising often cynically draws on our fantasies and dreams; it tries to make us think that through consumption we can become happier. Our idea is to create a website which emphasizes the temporality of life and therefore we are selling transience. We want to subvert the cynicism of the advertising industry, and replace it by linking transience to encouraging people to celebrate life and take advantage of it. We want to create a forum for people to post pictures of what they cherish; we will create a stencil the audience will be able to use in their pictures (as done for example by The Bubble Project or The Burger King Brands). By encouraging people to post pictures of what makes them happy we in turn want them to celebrate life. Our main objective is to show that happiness is to be gained through simple life, as opposed to the consumption of products. We could link it to the optimistic philosophy of Epicurus (Sharples, 1996).


Target Audience
We want to include as large amount of people as possible as we would like them to interact and contribute to the development of our website. We will be focusing the promotion of our campaign amongst our student body through posters around the university as well as e-mails through the university e-mail system. We have also planned to create a wiki account to be used to get the users to generate and edit content surrounding the idea of transience and interactivity. Our audience is not limited to young people and students. The only requirement is computer literacy and access to the Internet.


Project Timeline
PRE-PRODUCTION- Establishing ideas, - Opening and contributing to blog; - Researching ideas of interactivity, mainstream advertising, culture jamming and subversive advertising.- Consolidating our ideas into one combined theme, which is relevant to the brief, and one that we can use as a basis to begin the initial construction of our piece. -Sketches, drafts, etc.
PRODUCTION- Refining the pre-production ideas, amendments to storyboard.- Work on images and other visual material.- Design of logo in Adobe Illustrator. - Work on interactive SWF files.- Placing the elements in Dreamweaver. - Opening a WIKI and linking it to the website.- Design of posters in InDesign. POST-PRODUCTION- Placing website online. - Sending e-mails to the rest of students in the module; messages on Facebook, group. - Printing posters, placing them in computer areas of the university to encourage traffic to the website.
Short Project Description
Our interactive website will be created using Adobe Flash and Dreamweaver; it will have “an expiry date” and encourage users to think about how to start making the most of life now. In order to demonstrate interactivity the content of our website will largely be user generated, for instance we want to incorporate the wiki and make use of social networking site such as Facebook. The website will make use of digital audio.
As mentioned, other media will be also used as part of the campaign.
Relationship between theory and practiceIn our project we aim to marry theory to practice and deploy theories on the contemporary media and communication.


Bibliography:

Adbusters (2008) 'About Adbusters.' [Online]. Available from:http://www.adbusters.org/about/adbusters[Accessed 07 March 2009].

Danesi, M. (2006) Brands. New York and London: Routledge.

Habermas, J (1989) The structural transformation of the public sphere : an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society /translated by Thomas Burger. Cambridge : Polity Press.

Interbrand (2009) Branding Studies. [Online]. Available from:http://www.interbrand.com/studies_list.aspx?langid=1000[Accessed 07 March 2009].

Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence culture : where old and new media collide. New York : London : New York University Press.

Lasn, K. (2000) Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America. New York: Morrow.

Lucas, G. and Dorrien, M. (2006) Guerilla Advertising. Unconventional Brand Communication. London: Laurence King Publishing.

Meyers, H and Gerstman, R. (2001) Branding @ the Digital Age. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave.

Rosenzweig, G. (2002) Sams teach yourself Flash MX ActionScript in 24 hours. Indianapolis: Sams.

Sharples, R. W (1996) Stoics, Epicureans and sceptics : an introduction to Hellenistic philosophy. London : Routledge.

The Bubble Project. (2008) 'Manifesto'. [Online]. Available from:
http://www.thebubbleproject.com/[Accessed 01 March 2009].

The Burger King Brands (2004) 'The Subservient Chicken'. [Online]. Available from:
http://www.subservientchicken.com/[Accessed 25 February 2009].

Wolff Ollins (2008) 'BrandNext'. [Online]. Available from:
http://www.wolffolins.com/brandnext/[Accessed 06 March 2009].



have some nice visual ideas; and readng book about design techniques with special focus on logo&graphic identity (Citron, 2008). We already discussed some deas for logo. I suggested an arrow and it was agreed by the group.

I think it could be very suitable shape as Danesi (2006) wrote that the best logos are usually simple geometrical shapes.
more details soon...