For studio brief 3 we were each given a Bruce Willis film and asked to design a 2 colour poster for it. Die Hard was the poster that I was given. I looked online at existing alternative posters for Die Hard and found a huge array. Below are some of my favourite. Although this was good research and gave me some inspiration a lot of the posters were very similar to my initial ideas. This was irritating as I wanted to do something original and the huge amount of Die Hard posters already out there made this more difficult.
I wanted to do some more research into effective viral campaigns. I looked online and found this article in Forbes magazine. The article talks about how and why campaigns go viral. The article is concluded with 'three top tips' and these sum up the main points of the article.
1) Focus on psychology, not technology. Think about WHY people talk and share
2) Remember that social is more than social media. Don’t forget offline word of mouth
3) Follow the Six key STEPPS: Social Currency, Triggers, Emotion, Public, Practical Value, and Stories
Another member of my group told me about a TED talk which also looks at the reasons that videos go viral. Kevin Alloca, an employee at youtube gives the talk and he has some interesting ideas. He says that for something to go viral there are 3 things needed. The first is a trend setter, this is someone with a large following such as a celebrity of some sorts. They are needed to endorse and promote the video. The next is Participation. When the audience can get involved with something it makes it much more memorable. The third is unexpectedness. Only by surprising the audience can you get your message across effectively and make them want to share it.
One of the campaigns I looked at straight away was 'The Whole Picture' campaign for the Guardian Newspaper. The campaign was designed by BBH London and as well as the poster campaign they produced a video that went viral. I decided to look at this as it was encouraging people to read newspapers, essentially the same objective as our campaign. Although the campaign is really strong it didn't really give me any ideas for the campaign.
I looked online at a few different blogs that had compiled some of the most effective viral campaigns but again none of these inspired me for our particular subject matter
As our group had decided in the first session together that we wanted to focus on News and current affairs I thought that it would be interesting to do something with interviews with the public as News channels often interview the public within their coverage of a story. This reminded me of a video I had seen previously. It is part of a series of videos that runs on an American TV show. The videos are called 'Jimmy Kimmel Lie Witness News.' Essentially the videos are made to show how ignorant the public can be by asking them false questions and showing how they answer.
I thought that this was definitely an avenue we could go down with the video for our campaign.
