With the pitch to the people from ZigZag, my group’s goal was to pitch three services of the high-class grocery store chain Booth’s using different visual mediums for each, since they haven’t had any major advertising since 2010. Our first idea was a television advertisement that showed off the advantages and discounts of the Booth’s card for customers already familiar with the store, our second was a Facebook advertisement that appealed to young folk and sold Booth’s as a high-quality option for food, and our third was a mobile advertisement that enticed busy users to use Booth’s Christmas dinner delivery service. My role in the project was to develop the mobile advertisement idea and figure out a target audience for the service.
Since we had just learned the differences between research and insight in our module, I attempted to find a problem that the Christmas delivery service would solve using research to back up my claims. It took me awhile, but I managed to learn that the average Christmas meal takes around 4 hours to prepare, many people in today’s younger generation don’t have the cooking skills to prepare a Christmas dinner, a vast majority of today’s generation do their shopping online, and a Christmas dinner is an extremely important part of British family society. The problem that many people in British society face is they want to cook a Christmas dinner because it is one of the few family dinners still being had, but they either don’t have the time or knowledge to cook such a meal.
It took me a long time finding the research I needed to support my insight and find my target audience. On the one hand, I could hypothesize that lots of young people are busy and use their phones to shop, and that a Christmas meal is important, but I needed evidence to back that up, especially since I’ve had little experience with British holiday culture. Luckily, I managed to find articles online through Daily Mail and British Turkey that showed how stressful preparing a Christmas meal is, and how important it is in British culture. Stats from YouGov also helped me find hard evidence that lots of people use their mobile phones for shopping. After finding this vital information, I could move forward with developing the advertisement, since I now had an imaginary persona of a person whom I can target the advertisement towards.
During the pitch of the mobile advertisement, I accidentally let my dislike for mobile advertisements slip through and described the full-screen mobile advertisement as ‘intrusive’ and ‘annoying.’ One of the people from ZigZag pointed that out to me afterwards and, even though he agreed with me that mobile ads are annoying, he suggested that I shouldn’t use those terms during my pitch. Describing an advertisement as ‘annoying’ or ‘intrusive’ doesn’t make the advertisement very appealing to my client, and they might not want to go through with it as it could cost them customers in their minds. I totally agree with that statement, and I learned that I should be more careful with the wording I use for selling a product I’m pitching. Hopefully next time I’ll catch myself and use more appealing words to describe my product, especially if my career as a filmmaker depends on it.
Links to our Creative Briefs: