Advertising assingment suggestions?

August 14, 2008 12:27 PM

Planning a 100-level Intro to Advertising course... were you fond of any creative assignments or group projects, if you ever took this class?

Or anything that is overdone and should be avoided?

posted by starman to education (5 comments total)

We had to make our own video advertisement for a fictional product, which was a blast. Might not work for very large classes, but I took my intro to advertising in the summer where there wasn't a large class (maybe 50 people) so YMMV.
posted by Verdandi at 12:41 PM on August 14, 2008

This is a bit tangential, but during the nineties I took a course about the business environment in post-Soviet Russia. As a project we had to do a case study about taking a state enterprise private (nothing really hard core, this was a low-level undergrad course). The business plans students came up with usually involved lots of advertising and marketing ideas and it was a fun project. It seems like that might be a nifty twist for you to add to a class project, and privatization of state enterprises is something that also could be in the setting of China, Vietnam, or maybe even a hypothetical Cuban near-future.
posted by XMLicious at 12:52 PM on August 14, 2008

We did a research paper on why the switch from Coke to NEW Coke was such a PR disaster. We had to outline what went wrong and what could have been improved. For a research paper, it was pretty interesting stuff.
posted by Spyder's Game at 1:10 PM on August 14, 2008

my intro to advert class wasn't really creative at all. it was more historical and informational, focusing on famous ad campaigns (apple, vw, coke, etc.) as well as the evolution of advertising. we also learned how advertising companies work, how they work, advertising information, and we compared prices on how much it would cost to put a advertisement in our local paper versus a 30 second spot on local news, and the pros and cons of both. we toured a local advertising agency to get a feel of how the business is.

i did enjoy the intro courses, but because i was more interested in graphic design, later classes were better for me. here are a couple of the things we did in later classes:

- in a team, we were assigned a "company", and we had to create a complete advertising package for that company - magazine ads, newspaper ads, internet ads, storyboards for a 30 second commercial, billboards, direct mail, and a radio script. this, however, lasted a large portion of the semester. we spent about 6 weeks total on it.

- in one class, every week a DISASTER card from a deck was pulled. the disaster would be anything from the company you've created an ad for just found out their rival is putting out a similar product to office politics to explaining to your client that his ad idea sucks. then we each had 20 minutes to type out how we would handle the situation.

- we did lots and lots of research papers - LOTS of them.
posted by kerning at 4:35 PM on August 14, 2008

Thanks for all the suggetions. I welcome more if anyone has any.
posted by starman at 7:58 PM on August 15, 2008