The Ad workshop experience
Fight it! Cure it! Deal with it!
My name is Christina Preventza and I had the opportunity to work with Professor Betty Tsakarestou in the Ad workshop project. Mrs Tsakarestou is an Assistant Professor, Head of Advertising and PR Lab in Panteion University, Dept. of Communication, Media and Culture of Athens and for this semester she wanted her students to come up with innovative and interesting ideas for a startup campaign. And that’s what we did. Salomi, Vasw and I are three undergraduate students of Journalism and Marketing. We combined our love for life and helping people and came along with the challenge of creating an organization which helps patients with four rare diseases ( Friedrich’s ataxia, Myositis, Young Alzheimer, Addison disease). Our desire? great social impact!
For the details about our first meeting and the decisions we made, you have to read the article below (https://medium.com/@dimavasiliki/fe20f7fedb0e#.bk34qgb24). It’s the only way you understand completely our challenge ;)
So back to me now!!
Our next stage was the map we made with post-its narrating parts of our project. Who’s idea was though? During our lesson in class one beautiful morning our Professor introduced us to this idea of making the map. We took a big white cardboard and with some colors and post-its we wrote down the little girl’s story who suffered from a rare disease and she couldn’t walk, so she used her wheelchair. Beside every paragraph we also draw a sketch of the storytelling. It was about a kid so we wanted it to be more playful and optimistic. Besides, in the end everything turned out as good as possible. This story is really touching as our little hero girl was being bullied by her classmates in school due to her disease. Her parents understood that at some point, so they decided they should do something about it. They came across with our Facebook page and they called us. Two representatives of our action office came in touch with them and they helped the kid. They appeared to her school and they made clear some rare diseases and their impacts to patients. They explained to them that it wasn’t right to make fun of these people cause they were the true warriors of life. In the end the kids became her friends and she was never alone. For this map we worked altogether and I could say it was really fun. Here are some photos you could see.
Then we uploaded this story and the map travelled through the Internet. Our aim was to bring other people into the shoes of these patients. We came in touch with some of them via Facebook and they felt the need to share with us and the world some of their personal moments of their life. So they provided us with some pictures of showing confidence and we shared them with the rest of the world.
This is Ben. Ben suffers from Friedreich’s ataxia, in this photo we see him sitting proud in his wheelchair.
In this photo we see a group of people who just had their group therapy. They appear very calm and comfortable. These psychotherapy sessions really helped them to go on and never give up!
With the use of the map and the storytelling we helped people to imagine the situation and come to other’s shoes. By their comments we realized that we really helped them and they were feeling more comfortable already. School bullying has decreased and people’s empathy has increased. This project made us enthusiast about the challenge that we were on and more willing to raise awareness and help.
Please read the ending of our story below (https://medium.com/@salomisideri/the-ad-workshop-experience-5f3cdf0fdcbe#.ymdl5k4xg) written by Salwmi which refers to the part of the Marketing, the competition and much more.
Thank you everyone for your time and thank you my colleagues too for this experience. Mrs Tsakarestou you couldn’t be a better leader, thank you for your advice and your patience!!!
