The introduction to the Advertising and Media world

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AD DISCOVERY — CREATIVITY Stories by ADandPRLAB

6 min readJul 13, 2021

Cannes Lions winner Ad -Startup Presentation- Storytelling on Social Media

Follow Your heART — 1st Medium Article

We are the team Follow Your HeART. A newborn company whose aim is
to provide young, talented, but unknown artists with a safe online space,
in which they will be free to exhibit their work and communicate their
artistic ideas. This startup business, founded by Greek students Theleia
Papantoni and Marialena Stoubou Sideri, is part of a larger project
conducted during our fourth semester and more specifically in the
context of the course Introduction to Advertising and Media Relations.
In the following pages we will shortly present our team’s journey those
past few months, whilst giving some insight into the tasks we have
completed. Our work has been divided in three separated articles. In the first of our articles we analyze the advertising “See Sound” as one of the award winning campaigns of the Cannes Lions Awards 2019, we proceed with the presentation of our own startup company “Follow Your heART” and for the end we have the task that we were assigned with by Ms. Eleni Karamalegkou,Group Social Media Director at Sky, London.

|See Sound

As young students who were pretty much unfamiliar with the “Advertising & PR Communications” sphere, we embarked on the journey having mixed feelings of fear, excitement and curiosity. We practically had our first exposure to this field when we were assigned the project of analyzing and presenting one of the winning ads of the 2019 Cannes Lions Grand Prix, on the 22 of March. It did not take us long to choose between the numerous ads that were awarded, as one of them immediately drew our attention. Wavio, in collaboration with Area 23, came up with the idea of constructing a simple yet really useful tool, that would serve the needs of hearing-impaired people around the world. The campaign was named “See sound”, and was undoubtedly one of the few that aimed at selling a product that would improve the everyday experience of millions of people that are facing difficulties in their life. We soon came to realize that up until now we have never come across any ad that refers to smaller groups of people with special needs and so we spent some time exchanging thoughts on the situation. We found out that in our country, Greece, hearing-impaired people are close to 40.000, a rather insignificant number for a country with such insufficient facilities, whereas almost 466 million people are facing hearing problems globally. This “discovery” made us want to promote the specific ad and more importantly showcase the social issue that it is addressing. Wavio’s ad does more than just offer a novel solution. It brings a very pressing problem to the surface, by embodying the personal experiences of people who are hard of hearing. Such a decision, strengthens the viewers empathy and comprehension not only towards the Deaf community, but also towards other groups of people with disabilities of different kinds. Not many campaigns achieve to have such a positive impact, by means of developing innovative technologies and spreading awareness for the betterment of the society, but we can for sure say that the founders of “See sound”, managed to do so by making the first important step into the future. In one of their interviews, they actually stated that except from simplifying and ameliorating the lives of people worldwide, their biggest aspiration was to inspire the younger generations to always chase their dreams and persuade startups to focus on social/human issues through diversity and innovation.

|Our your Startup/Follow Your heART

In this section of the article, we will give a short but informative description of our first big project, the construction of our startup company “Follow Your HeART”. As the name indicates, art is the cornerstone of our company and what we think makes it so unique and special is the story behind it. In brief, the idea was conceived after we paid a visit to an old friend. Entering the house, the first thing we noticed were some beautiful paintings hanging on the walls. We soon realized they were not the creations of a well-known artist, but those of our friend. After talking for a while, he shared with us his thoughts and worries and expressed his deep disappointment, stemming from his inability to enter into the Arts world. Having many friends who were dealing with problems that would impede them from pursuing their dream, such as lack of promotion, unstable job opportunities or even parents’ beliefs on educational topics, we thought it would be a great idea to help by providing them with the opportunity to share their talent with the world. As our target audience consists of mainly young people (aged 16–23), we decided to combine technology with art and build an online environment, open to artists from all around the country. A web-based company allows for not only great variety, but also easy worldwide access (since physical presence is not required) with almost zero cost. Artists who show interest in becoming part of this online “family”, will be able to demonstrate their work, come in contact with important galleries and slowly create a name for themselves in the art industry. It is crucial to point out that one of the biggest advantages of our business, is the safe working space it offers to artists, to freely express themselves and create strong relationships based on trust and comprehension. Except from the regular weekly uploads on the site, online and off-line exhibitions will be organized in order to give our artists the chance to talk a bit more about their values and inspirations and maybe communicate face to face with potential buyers and people interested in their work. Being responsible for both the representation and promotion of our clients’ work, the only thing we ask in return is passion, willingness and creativity. We are talent hunters, formers of a well-needed artistic community in Greece, but our vision is to become a powerful website with a strong reputation and an expanded audience.

|Storytelling on Social Media by Ms. Karamalegkou

During one of our course, we had the opportunity of conducting an effecive dialogue with Ms. Eleni Karamalegkou, Group Social Media Director at Sky, London. With our conversation topic being about content marketing, the task that we were assigned with, involved us choosing two TV shows of our liking and focus on their social media strategy. Our choices were The Queen’s Gambit and The Crown, both TV Shows produced by Netfilx.

We tried to draw some differences and similarities between the launch strategies of these two shows on social media. We took a look at the content provider’s social media channels and tried to come to some conclusions regarding their target audience and branding objectives with parallel mention at their their commercial goals. The required research on this topic, made us understand how meaningful social media marketing strategies are and the amount of power that they hold. They way that a show is being presented on social media platforms and the quality of the content that is uploaded on each platform can have an effect on peoples’ opinion about the whole show just by going through their social media accounts. All in all, we were able to learn some basic steps of how to create a successful social media campaign for our start-up company, but most importantly, no matter under how much pressure we are, we learned that we have to make the best out of any given situation in order to deliver the best possible results.