On Friday morning everyone scurried into their seats for townhall with laptops in laps, still frantically working on getting our briefs ready before the impending deadline. To my surprise, and relief, we were informed that there was no town hall and we went straight into Alan’s master class. I think he may have known that our 2 week brief deadline was in a matter of hours because his class was swift and to the point. 

He began with a quote about oysters… I don’t recall the exact wording of the quote but I do know that the point of it was that grit builds pearls, or something like that. I always enjoy a masterclass where we are taught about a technique and then get to watch a video of an ad immediately afterwards as an example, and I especially enjoy this when the ad being used in the example is not one of the ones that we’ve already been shown 27 times this semester. I guess that’s another thing I’ve learned, there’s a lot of bad ads out there and very few exemplary ones.

 Alan showed us how the best strategy comes from the truth and the classic example for this is the @Marmite “Love it or hate it” campaign. As someone who has never tried Marmite, I guess I just have to take their word for it. If I had to guess, I would probably put myself in the hate category but I am in no rush to try it so we may never know. It may be a product truth but it certainly doesn’t make me want to buy the product! It definitely made me start thinking and I realised that lately I’ve been so focussed on coming up with creative ad campaigns that I almost forgot the point was to sell the product. I think that since ads are so prevalent in our daily lives now, I’m more likely to acknowledge and appreciate a funny/clever ad and be inclined to buy the product as a nod to the creative team. On the flip side, I find that products and brands that are so in your face with their lazy “buy my product” ads actually make me want to avoid their products just out of spite! Perhaps that’s just me… but who knows, I might be onto something here. 

To end this brief SCAB from this brief class, here is how I think it would go if I tried Marmite:

@izzystordy