So InDesign went pretty well. We had an hour and a half to re-create an advertisement from some company. Pretty funny. The silly part was that I had to adapt myself to the 2.0 version, while at home I’m a CS user. Not that it has been a problem, but the side-tabbed interface from CS really is more functional. I had to search a little more, which caused a small delay, but in the end, the entire master and the details of the ad itself were more than sufficient to pass.
Tomorrow’s SPSS. The Superior Performing Software Systems. Basically it’s a platform that allows you to integrate a lot of plugs, each with their own functions and purposes, but this year, we’ve only studied the standard module.
What it does is simple to explain. It helps marketeers to calculate stuff.
We’ve been using it for our campaign project this year, when we took a survey in 5 different high schools in the province. I did three schools myself, polling about 25 kids per class with a three paged question list about their hobbies, membership to sportclubs, taste of clothing and many other things. The target group was kids aged between 12 and 16, chosen from various sorts of studying directions.
I think together with the other members of the campaign group (we were called ‘dixit’, a funky name I came up with) we roughly polled about 200 kids, in a few days time.
The results needed to be introduced into SPSS, in order to output the conclusions of the poll. First we needed to encode our poll, sort of like when you’re using Access. So every question gets a value, every possible answer too. In the end, the entire poll is translated into a mathematical setup, that allows you to calculate the results, to make connections between different entries, or to compare different results on an axis, which has an output in a nice statistical way :
[ Client was a non-profit organisation that offers 'emotional' assistance.]
But we had a serious problem. Really, a fundamental problem.
So, we decided to take the bet and think of a ’sub’ company to our client. A division that would specifically target the 12 to 16 years old youngsters and that would have more brand-awareness. Bearing in mind the fact our client already has a ten year activity in the market, the lack of brand-awareness is highly disturbing within the given target age range. Therefor there had to be something new, totally different, very dynamic and easy to recognize.
We’ve proposed to make a new brand, with a new logo. Since the brand-awareness was non-existing it doesn’t matter if you radically change brands. Nobody knows, so nobody’ll notice. This new brand will exist in the shadow of the old one, without attempting to replace it. The entire small budget (2000$) could be spent on a complete scheduled campaign for this new brand. We’ve set it out til the smallest details, I even came up with a company that could print everything for a very low price. I hope they get ‘the call’. Here’s what I doodled for the logo :
And in the end it looked like this :
There was a slogan etc, but it was all in Dutch so you only see the main lay-out of the poster.
So. Tomorrow at high-noon, I’ll have to go prove I can work with SPSS.
It’s the last real exam. The other two that are left, sociology and marketing, both are presentations or discussions about papers that are done already, so in fact, work is over. School’s out for summer. :)
I think I’ll celebrate this in the sun with a pure scotch, the ice held back.
