Advertisement plan
Our Advertisement Plan:
To begin to strategise our advertising plan we had to consider the question of “who is the target audience? who uses, purchases, decides? Where is the audience?” (Farbey, 1998, p. 19). Once we can establish our target audience then we can design our types of advertisement.
Target Audience:
Our target audience will be students at the University of Lincoln, tutors that teach them and the people of Lincoln City. Therefore this will effect where and how we advertise for our performance.
Where To Advertise And The Types Of Advertising Implemented:
The types of advertising that we agreed to use where as follows:
- Posters.
- Stickers (for coffee stirrers and ‘coffee cup advertising’).
- Word of mouth.
- Previous performances.
The locations for these types of advertising will be where our target audience will be from Monday 14th May onwards such as the LPAC and around Lincoln city. The justification of these locations are that 3rd year Drama students and lecturers are in the LPAC this week either performing or watching performances, furthermore students using the library for revision purposes use the LPAC cafe for refreshments. This will potentially give us a vast range of audience members to watch our performance.
As well as this, advertising our posters in various locations around Lincoln city such as high street shops will extend our range from those that are on campus to those not from the University.
The next step would be to design the posters and the stickers. The design of the poster was taken from my initial idea of a black background with white lettering stating our company name and behind this in white lettering will be numbers to represent our statistics. Improving on this was crucial because as Bryan Holme states in The art of advertising “the poster artist aims to achieve instant contact with the viewer, so the advertisers message- perhaps no more than a single word- hits them at first glance” (1985, p. 5). So what we developed was the writing on the poster so that someone would find it interesting enough to read it. So the new posters state in large white lettering THIRTY STUDIO 2 7PM 17. 5. 12 and behind this writing is one of our statistics copied multiple times to fill the poster. This will instigate curiosity in someone who sees our posters with them trying to make sense of what the statistic means in relation to our piece. Furthermore we produced posters with different statistics so those that see them will become even more curious and want to see our piece.
As well as posters we printed out stickers that state a statistic and information about our piece. With the help of the staff at cafe Zing in the LPAC we were able to stick a batch on some coffee stirrers and then the majority will be stuck on to coffee or tea cups by the cafe staff. This ‘coffee cup advertisement’ works well as this will lead to conversations about what our performance could be about and therefore creating a snowball effect of conversation and interest for our piece.
One problem with the posters is where to place them in the LPAC because the “advertisement can suffer from its surroundings, from ad’s with conflicting messages and aesthetics” (1985, p. 5) in that there are a lot of other posters around the LPAC advertising both students performances and professional performances. To tackle this we put up over twenty posters across all three floors of the LPAC including the cafe area, main doors into the building, faculty door and most of the studio doors.
Our advertisement campaign has already been given great feedback from staff and students alike in the way we have designed our posters to encourage curiosity from our target audience. We are confident that our simple yet effective way of advertising will help us to achieve the high number of audience members that we want.
Farbey, A (1998) How to produce successful advertising: A guide to strategy, planning and targeting. London: Kogan Page Limited.
Holme, B (1985) The art of advertising. London: Peerage Books.