Get a Load of This
a case study by brooke aden
Beginning stages of the campaign
Picture This:
It’s the first semester of your senior year. We’re in the big leagues, or at least it feels that way. You’re booked and busy, creatively fulfilled, yes, but overworked and underpaid. Your classes are as demanding as they get, each one pulling a limb in different directions. You’re tired. Staying up late just to get everything done on time, it’s better done than perfect, (there’s just not enough hours in the day). You’re never getting enough sleep and you have to wake up early just to do it all over again, even if that means you're operating on autopilot fueled by caffeine and motivated by deadlines.
NSAC 2023-2024
It’s the first day of school.
I head to the first class that claims to prepare me for our senior capstone in the spring semester. This class, strategic communication, is designed to research a client for the annual AAF National Student Advertising Competition (NSAC). The client for the 2023-2020 school year? Tide. Their focus for the campaign? Increase cold water washing in 18-35 year olds.
Immediately my brain starts twirling, doing somersaults and backflips, the ideas are flowing. I open a blank document and title it ‘Tide Vomit’ (this is an essential part of my creative process, get all the bad ideas out so there is more room for the good ones), I start furiously writing taglines. One of the first that came to mind?
“Get a Load of This.”
I break up with that document for most of the semester because we just aren’t to that point yet. The purpose of the fall semester was to research. Research, research, research. I surveyed. I audited. I ate, slept, and breathed Tide. My notes were orange, blue, and yellow, written in Gotham. In order for me to understand this brand, I had to method act, I had to live the brand in order to create a campaign for it.
Semester 1 Pitch:
At the end of first semester, our class was assigned a final group project. We had to make a campaign for Tide. My group landed on my “Get a Load of This” tagline. Our campaign consisted of a social media series, a college ambassador program, and a cross marketing opportunity with Tide x The Color Run. This campaign wasn’t perfect, but it was a great start.
Here’s What the
First Draft Looked Like…
The Truth is:
it’s okay…
For being as sleep deprived, overworked, and busy as I was, I think they turned out okay. The thought was there, but the details weren’t. I didn’t even put the Tide logo on the first post. GASP! How could I forget that? Aside from that, there are some proximity, contrast, and hierarchy issues and a royal crap ton of orange. This was a fine first draft, but again, getting something done to meet a deadline is far more important than perfection.
So, I started to fine tune the ideas I had in semester one. Iterate, iterate, iterate. I wanted to incorporate the shape of a laundry dial because Tide wasn’t aiming to sell Tide, they wanted to sell cold. During the spring semester, my brain function started to dramatically improve. I started prioritizing sleep and healthier habits, and these changes did wonders for my creativity. I was finally able to conceptualize the idea of selling cold water by strategic use of icons and color theory.
Moving Forward
As the year rolled on, we started getting deeper and deeper into this campaign. Semester one flew by, and now on to semester two, the capstone. Our class separated into three loads (teams), research, strategy, and creative. I was elected into a team lead role of sorts, guiding the creative team alongside another classmate. I had my eye on the prize, designing the campaign pitch book, a project that has been a dream since the beginning of my college career.
Back to the
Drawing Board
Bill Nye
Tide is the most trusted laundry brand on the shelves, so we decided we must pick the most trusted scientist in the game, Bill Nye.
Better, but
Not Great
At this point in the semester, I desperately needed someone to throw me a bone. The initial excitement started to fade, students starting skipping class, our instructor was not very organized, no one knew what was going on or what to do, and I was backed into a corner. I have never been a team ‘lead’ before and I struggled to delegate. This problem got better later on, but whenever I asked someone do do something, the results were consistently falling flat and I didn’t feel comfortable putting subpar work into the campaign. I simply wasn’t able to settle for something less than first place material, so this resulted in me having to remake a lot of the work anyway.
I knew that I had the strongest design background of the entire group, and what I mean by that is I was the only one actually studying it, relentlessly. I knew I would be responsible for this piece, but I didn’t know I would be doing the heavy lifting with copywriting as well, something I wasn’t as strong at.
As you can tell, the copy in this second iteration of social media posts is subpar, almost…bad even. My goal was shock factor, that was my strategy behind the first slide “YOU ARE DOING YOUR LAUNDRY WRONG…” Coming from the most used laundry detergent brand in the world, I felt that this would make people take a step back and really think, well if Tide is telling me I’m doing it wrong then maybe I actually am. The rest of the copy isn’t great simply because I couldn’t do it all. I wanted to be the girl who made the already written words look cool, not be the girl who wrote them. I chose to add in more blue, as it connotes the idea of cold water, (it gets better I promise).
Pitch Book: Draft 1
I think I hate
This One…
As you can see, this clearly isn’t my best work. There isn’t enough content in some places, too much content in others, too much orange, and yet my professor insisted that I turn in a draft even though the content was not yet finished and important campaign tactics were not yet decided. There were differences in opinion in what type of campaign our class wanted to produce versus what my professor wanted. At this point in the semester, my began to excitement fade as well. I was burnt out, frustrated, tired, but I did my best with what I was given, and that’s all I have to say about that.
Final
Social Media Campaign
Final
Pitch Book
PHEW!
By the grace of the graphic design gods, I was able to pull myself together. After my classmates were finally given enough time to draft some copy, complete a photo shoot, and make final decisions (at the mercy of my professor’s final approval) and we ended up placing second at the AAF National Student Advertising Competition. We placed second, not first. What did the first place team have? Some of the ideas we came up with before they were shut down by my professor. One being that Tide sponsors misting tents at popular music festivals like Coachella and Lollapalooza. The idea went like this: you’re at the music festival, you’re hot, bothered, and just want some water that’s not $10+ when you stumble upon a bright orange tent that mists you with cold water, all you have to do is turn the dial to cold to switch the misters on for a minute. After the minute is done you exit the tent and get handed a free bottle of cold water from someone wearing a Team Tide shirt. You thank the Team Tide goddess that gave you the water and remember them, you remember how good the cold mist felt on your skin, but most of all, you remember that switching the dial to cold made all of that magic happen. Yes, this idea was shut down by our professor. Yes, this was an idea presented by the winning team. Would we have won if we implemented it? Who’s to say. I’ll take my second place, but I’ll always wonder if it could have been first.