Our journey in Advertise-land! •AD&PR Lab Journey•
by Once Upon an AD.
Once upon a time, five ambitious Panteion University students started their advertising agency. They were full of dreams and hopes about their new beginning. In each project that they took they were fully dedicated and determined to reach the top but their journey wasn’t all fun and happy moments there were many storms and difficulties, however, these five girls never gave up they kept going and nothing could have stopped them! So let’s dive into the details of this story…What projects did they undertake? How did they manage them? Were they a success after all? Let’s see!
Being given the chance to create, strategically plan and handle with professionalism the advertising and promotion projects, may felt a little daunting at first, but it surely was very liberating, as our agency managed to show its true “colorful palette” and the ambitious dreams of what and where we aspire to be in the future. The “moto” our advertising agency adopted is “Perhaps the greatest risk any of us will ever take is to be seen as we really are”. With that saying we want to show that we are a team who wasn’t and will never be afraid to take risks, always tries for the best possible result, and will always support its clients for who they are and what they have to offer. Our main goal was to use the creativity of our agency in an unexpected way because nowadays most advertisements seem common, and insipid. This would not only capture the attention of our clients but also help us as an advertising agency, to outgrow ourselves and follow a new revolutionary path towards progress and later success. One of the biggest and most challenging projects that “Once Upon an AD” took up was the collaboration with the well-known Costa Coffee, one of the largest coffeehouses around the world. Once Upon an AD as an agency started immediately consumer research to understand where Costa Coffee stands among the other coffee brands by carrying out an online survey through Google Forms and then continued with secondary research by taking some interviews (focus group). Once Upon an AD, also, did some research about the trending coffee brands, focused on SWOT and PEST analysis and the 4P’s (product, price, place, promotion). In a secondary stage, our agency analyzed the creative rationale and after many meetings and brainstorming found the Big Idea that we hoped would amaze our client and bring huge success. Finding the Big Idea was a fun and challenging journey. The Big Idea was a “Friends” like themed campaign aligned with the energy and happiness of a flash mob. People gathering and dancing in a famous square with the characteristic background of the famous show “Friends”, which could not have been other than the iconic fountain with the couch. This Idea was all summed up with the phrase “Don’t Rush, Dance”, and this was the BIG IDEA that led the new Costa Coffee campaign. In order to support the general idea, our agency was very active on social media, posting “Friends” themed memes on Instagram and Facebook and humorous videos on Tik Tok about the greatness of Costa Coffee products.
This campaign helped us realize our power and gave us a real advertising taste. We had the chance to show ourselves as real advertisers and show more clearly our biggest intentions as an agency, which is no other than to navigate our clients through the futuristic paths of media and advertising. It is also worth mentioning that with the SWOT and PEST analysis, we had the chance to analyze a brand and see not only the different tactics that it can follow but also that brands are not always as perfect as they seem and as an advertising agency we always have to be in action to develop our ideas. From the questionnaire results, we learned more about the wants, needs, and demands of our current and perhaps future clients. We thought that it is important to give, with no hesitation, the energy and the optimism that people need today. For this reason, we chose to present a world where people are dancing and laughing, showing the most positive part of their day as grabbing a cup of Costa Coffee. In conclusion, advertising helps to raise your target demographics’ awareness of issues with which they may be unfamiliar as well as educate them on the related benefits of your product or service. Invites your target audience to evaluate how your product or service measures up against your competitors and an ongoing advertising campaign is essential in reminding your existing customers that you’re still around. We can say, with no fear, that after this creative educational season, we became advertisers with passion and ideas that will mark the advertising world.
Each role we took, taught us something valuable from different perspectives. We had the chance not only to familiarize ourselves more with many aspects of technology but to also get outside of our comfort zones and be creative. As mobile creators, we had the opportunity to work with Magy Kontou, trainer at grow with Google, co-founder of simple apps, and many more. In this module, miss Kontou taught us how we can create our own apps step by step, and what platforms to use and practically introduced us to app development in all five stages (analyzing, designing, implementing, testing, publishing).
Each stage is as important as the rest since the total outcome is the product that the consumer is going to purchase or download. Also, we learned about interface design and some of the stages for the best result, such as thumbnails, block frame, wireframes, interface, and prototype. In this module, we were assigned an individual project to create our app in a quiz form and to do that, we used after the suggestion of miss Magy Kontou platforms such as Flaticon and Freepik, colors. co
and proto.io, having the last one be the base of the project. Using proto.io we had the chance to be in charge of the app creation using any inspiration we wanted and creating as many interactions in the app as we wanted. The project focused on a quiz app with three questions, but what was particularly interesting and liberating we could say as students were the fact that we didn’t have to stop there but we were able to take it as far as we wanted until our imagination run out. We had the liberty to create more
features, add links and pictures, sounds, characters, and many more. The aesthetic of the app was in our hands, it depended on each individual and that was what made the whole project a lot more interesting. Not only we had the freedom to create something from scratch based on our imagination and limits but we also had the opportunity to see how everybody else thinks and acts when allowed to be creative.
Ultimately, taking on the role of mobile creators was a really interesting project since we were able to learn the necessary steps and stages of the theoretical aspects of the job and also had the freedom to test our creativity and take a step to think outside the box based on our preferences and inspirations.
Our interaction with futuristic technologies didn’t end there. To create, we came to the conclusion that you not only need a vision but an aesthetic perception as well. In our journey to discover all the essential virtues and characteristics we should adopt to soon thrive in the modern business world, we had the pleasure to work with Dr. Panagiotis Zaharias, lead UX researcher, and founder of theUXProdigy and Antonis Birmpas, UX researcher, designer and co-founder of theUXProdigy. Through an enthusiastic approach, they gave us a taste of their field, explaining to us the meaning and importance of usability on websites and applications, as well as the UX laws and heuristics that should be taken into consideration during the process of design for the best possible user interface. In this particular module, we learned how to work even better as a team, as the project we were assigned needed us to work as a whole, representing our agency with extreme professionalism.
The task we were given was to choose a website or application and review it according to Jacob Nielsen’s heuristics, as well as create a proto persona who is going to follow some indicative tasks. Our team chose to evaluate the website/application “Shein”, a Chinese online fast fashion retailer. After successfully creating our proto persona, we had a better vision of what the user wanted and understood how it should correctly be delivered from the website/application. Utilizing the principles of usability and heuristics, we had the chance to look at this website from a very different perspective
than the one we were used to and realize how much more there is to web designing than we could ever imagine. A website that was seemingly perfect in our amateur eyes had many flaws and did not follow all the basic heuristics, which made us realize how much more successful, effective, efficient, and quick it could have been if it had paid attention to a few more things and invested more in usability and web design. Through our detailed presentation, we made sure to explain our viewpoint and
rationale adequately, showing that we had understood in depth the undeniable importance of usability in web design and every principle around it.
The positive feedback made us feel more confident in our journey of knowledge and showed us that working as a team can make it fun and easier to accomplish even the biggest of goals. By the end of this project, our team had realized that there are multiple points of view, and as creators, we are obliged to think outside the box, be more observant
and think in a more unique rather than common way. The world is different from each pair of eyes, and to stand out in the modern business world we should learn how to see what most people don’t.
This project gave “Once Upon an AD” a great experience of how things work in the real world, not just in the theory of a lab class, and most importantly taught us to work hard even if that means staying endless hours in front of a laptop thinking, typing, designing and drinking endless Costa Coffee to reach the top because don’t forget that as a fairytale-like agency “Once Upon an AD” always pursuits the happy end…Happily Ever After! Stay tuned because this fairytale isn’t over yet there are
more challenges to come, to be lived, and to be shared. Once Upon an AD awaits with great eagerness the next challenges of this endless journey and is ready to overcome every obstacle that will occur.
Professor: Betty Tsakarestou
Team Members: Alexandra Kolompourou, Melina Koutroumpa, Antigoni Papakosta, Xrysanthi Polo, Ioanna Sioutou
