Self+Reflection

Throughout the course, I have gained vast amounts of knowledge relating to the theory of online advertising. Part of the reason why I decided on taking the course was because I was always interested in how companies are able to employ effective campaigns through online media and channeling the Internet to their advantage. I thought that was really powerful and really relevant to my interests (as I'm trying to start up my own business) and with that spark of curiosity, I enrolled in the course and hoped for the best. Heading into the course however, I didn't know what to expect. To be honest, I'm more of the type of person who's comfortable with his artistic and creative side, I'm not tuned into business and the whole jargon is confusing to me so I didn't know what to expect or whether or not if I would have difficulty keeping up in the course; to my surprise however the whole concept of online advertising was very easy to follow.


 * Online Ad Critique:**

The Online Ad critique was the first assignment right out of the gate. We were tasked on analyzing two case studies of two online advertising campaigns and discuss their effectiveness/weaknesses and general impact. I wrote about the advertising that Warner Bros. did with the blockbuster film 'Watchmen', creating a viral site where they posted content of either photos/news/videos to garner hype for the eventual release of the film. The other article I wrote about was an online campaign turned viral where EA Sports fought back against a fan on the internet by mocking his video with the help of Tiger Woods. I learned that with the younger and hip demographics, companies tend to deploy viral advertising to their campaigns because its the most effective. Viral marketing enables content sharing to be much easier and this is aided with the help of social media networking sites that the majority of the younger demographic are registered to. Nowadays, it has become increasingly common for people to post interesting content they've stumbled on on their Facebook status, or even on their Twitter. There are also sites like Digg and StumbleUpon which display the most popular content of the web which are determined by a community of users where some of the most popular viral videos can be seen - ie. Rebecca Black's Friday, Bed Intruder. Viral is all about in-your-face shock value and craziness which illicit a generally huge response and so more and more companies are looking for ways to evoke the most reaction, which in turn will get the most people talking which leads to word of mouth advertising which costs the company next to nothing and it's the most trusted forms of advertising around due to its authenticity.

To display why viral marketing is the cool thing to do nowadays, check out this viral campaign on viral marketing by Smart Water spokesperson Jennifer Aniston:

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 * Online Ad Design:**

The second assignment had the class find a real company and with their permission create their own online advertising deliverables. I decided on creating online banners to promote my clothing line "Rapture Toronto" to be placed on various basketball sites, message boards and blogs. I also knew a couple of my friends who owned and ran blogs that drew heavy traffic on a daily basis and asked them if they could blog and write about the clothing line as a means of advertising. To track the effectiveness of this, I created my own account on Google Analytics which was absolutely free and tracked where the majority of the visitors were coming from. Google Analytics was able to keep a very detailed report on where exactly most of the traffic/guests were coming from. I also learned the business model when it came to implementing these web banners in websites such as Pay Per Click (PPC) and Cost Per Click (CPC).




 * Rapture Campaign:**

With everything I've learned in the course, it was time to finally implement all the concepts and theories into a real life campaign. My group and I decided to use my brand and created a plan of execution in terms of how to reach out to our targeted demographics. We evaluated our market through Porter's Five Forces which proved to be a very important tool when assessing a market. As well, we decided on taking a viral approach to our campaign as we wanted to promote participation from our target audience with the "What's Your Rapture?" campaign and the whole premise behind the idea is having people take pictures of themselves doing something they love and enjoy (their rapture) while wearing a Rapture t-shirt to gain prizes etc. We effectively used social media to our advantage and relied heavily on the power of a tweet and a facebook profile photo as we would use these to forward our campaign and help it spread like wildfire. I was also tasked with creating deliverables that could potentially turn viral like a short video on young adults running around the city of Toronto with their Rapture shirts on, as well as maintaining a blog that consistently turned out great content to have visitors come back for more and be interested in the Rapture lifestyle.

Online advertising has taught me that there is much to learn in the world of online advertising. There is literally thousands of ways a brand can go about advertising a certain product but that also doesn't mean that all of those methods are effective. The marketing/advertising team has really got to sit down together and think carefully before they execute their plan. Stating a clear marketing objective, and strategic analysis can go a really long way when it comes to putting down a strict focus on the campaign to prevent the campaign from going haywire due to lack of focus and organization. One must be careful and meticulous when it comes to their approach in online advertising, because for one you don't want to come off as an annoying spambot which could tarnish your brand's reputation... or worse... just ask [|Kenneth Cole].