Advertising Design Class

Regular readers of this blog know that I've recently been taking courses at UCLA Extension, working toward my certificate in Advanced Print & Graphic Communication.

(Regulars will also notice that I've just redesigned the look of my blog. This current iteration is just an experiment; I'm just playing around with the design. This one probably wont last very long, so don't get used to it! I would appreciate some feedback, though, if anyone cares to comment)

Anyway, one of my current UCLA courses is Advertising Design, and I thought I'd share some of my schoolwork with you.

This class has been a lot of fun. We just finished a campaign for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), as our first project. Basically, the assignment was to design a marketing strategy to attract a new, younger demographic to the museum, using a new "Street Art" exhibition as a draw.

The first couple of weeks was all research. We interviewed people from the group(s) we wanted to attract, learning their feelings about museums, art generally, and contemporary art in particular. We gathered information about their lifestyles, interests and desires.

Using the collected data, we decided on five archetypes for our demographic groups, and then created detailed "personas" to whom we would target our campaigns. After a (short) bit of in-class brainstorming, we students were given a mere week to develop a comprehensive campaign that we had to present (with a visual slideshow) at our next meeting. It was a huge amount of work, considering that this isn't our full-time job!

I LOVED IT.

The whole process was fascinating. My presentation included 10 slides (later expanded to 14), that outlined the goals and challenges of the campaign, the results of my research, and then several slides detailing my marketing ideas, which included some changes to MOCA's programming and in-museum experience. Fortunately, we didn't need to address any particular budget for our campaigns, so we could propose anything we wanted.

Here a few highlights from my slideshow...








I really enjoyed putting together the presentation. Less fun for me was actually getting up in front of the class and presenting it; let's just say I'm not the greatest public speaker! One thing that helped was that I'd written a script to go along with the slideshow, that allowed me to go greater into depth about my ideas, letting the slides simply act as interesting visuals and bullet-points.

In "real life," my experience in the world of advertising is limited, but I must say that I find the whole process to be thrilling. I'm looking forward to the next project in school, and keeping an eye out for any "real world" opportunities that may present themselves.