OSPS

Our Junior Marketing class is organizing a One Stop Prom Shop and has asked my class, Interactive Media and Digital Design for some help. My class will be in charge of the assembly at our school to promote it to our classmates. We have broke the assembly down into four parts; an intro dance, a video, an informational section, and a game show. We also split into four teams, I am part of audience involvement. We are in charge of getting the audience excited, and giving away a ton of free stuff in creative ways. This is a huge project that will involve help from every class.

Businesses

In Interactive Media and Digital Design the time has come to work with businesses to create a business card, logo, brochure, letterhead, or whatever they may need. I am working with the Band department of our school. Their holiday concert is coming up and they need brochures made to hand out with students names and the song list. I have to get the necessary information before I can start, but i will make a simple brochure and add holiday pictures to make it decorative and seasonal. This will be a simple task that can help out the band department.

Black Friday

I will be participating in black friday shopping chaos! I don't have any particular products I am interested in and I don't know of any great deals. I participate because the deals may not be huge, but I do receive a discount for the things I would normally buy.

A lot of people, including myself, wonder why the famous shopping day is called Black Friday. The name Black Friday was not considered a good thing at first. It was originally called this because so many went out to shop and it caused many accidents and violence.

I did not see any retailers offering mobile payment methods on Black Friday. Although, many offered online retail sites. Many using websites were able to get offers even before Black Friday and did not have to worry about the product they wanted running out of stock as soon as stores do. I have never seen as many people out on Black Friday as I did this year. It also wasn't quite as brutal. Other shoppers were more pleasant and I think it was because stores were running smoothly. Lines were long but went by quickly and employees were very helpful. This Black Friday was a good experience and went by smoothly.

Yearbook Design

Designing the yearbook cover was not an easy task. We had to follow a few requirements, and keep the design pretty simple. It was difficult to keep it simple, but be creative at the same time. Out of 40 designs one will be chosen by the yearbook staff. This makes it difficult because your designs will be judged by other classmates, and you want to be picked so it was hard to come up with good, creative ideas that are better than any of the others. If picked your design has the potential of being seen by the entire school, which puts a lot of pressure on you to be the best. I followed requirements by using the the title "The Cuyahogan" and this years title "Every Ending Is a New Beginning". I used the school colors and the mascot, a Tiger. I kept it simple, but tried to be as creative as I could. 

Business Letter & Letterhead

Our most recent project was to create a letterhead and business letter. We created a letterhead using logos we created when branding ourselves. Next, the business letters were created so we could send them to local prospects in our community hoping they would buy our designing services. We had to include what we do in class, what we can offer to the business, our different designing services, and how they can contact us. Hopefully, some of our prospects will contact us with interest in our services.

Branding Project

As a project we had to brand ourselves. We had to create a logo, find a headline text, supporting text, and supporting graphics. I created mine to look like a business card I had already created, so I used the same colors and supporting graphics. I wanted my things to go together and look somewhat similar. I had trouble creating a logo because it was difficult to come up with a design to represent myself, that is why I used my business card's graphics and colors to help come up with the logo. it made it a little easier and gave me something to work off of.

Carrots, carrots, carrots!

A local grower, named Mike Yurosek, who worked for Bolthouse carrot company, was growing frustrated with the fact that if carrots were not a particular size, shape, and color, they would be wasted. He got the idea to peel and cut them into one inch balls then peel and cut into 2 inches. The second ones are commonly known as baby carrots and were  a huge hit. They seemed to get people to eat more carrots. After a few years sales went flat, nobody knew why, and it was a huge problem. Jeff Dunn became CEO of this company 3 years ago and immediately wanted things to change. He started surveys and focus groups and found out when recession hit people were more likely to buy regular carrots to save money. He also realized that baby carrots have never been marketed.

He talked to 20 different agencies about different marketing strategies. After hearing all the different ideas, he imagined attractive individually wrapped bags of carrots that resembled potato chip bags, but the bags would cost 25% more. Crispin Porter, specializes in campaigns, started a campaign called "Eat Em' Like Junk Food" It was aired on three television shows and well as web series. Bolthouse company installed vending machines with carrots in high schools. These machines were selling 80-90 snacks per week, and Bolthouse test markets were up 10-12%. Schools have approached Bolthouse asking for the vending machines and in April they will experience their first movie tie in, with snacks promoting the movie, Hop. Also, in a lab and kitchen staff has been experiencing with different flavors. No flavors have been released but it will be healthy and all natural.

Branding and packaging has contributed the carrot success. After Bolthouse had realized they hadn't done anything to promote baby carrots and make them stand out, it created a lot of excitement for the company. They are hoping by changing their way of branding it will appeal to consumers more.

The newfound niche may create a whole new world for carrots. If their new packaging creates success and the flavoring idea works it will create competition for other brands to step it up and meet the new standards. Other companies will fall behind if they don't meet the new needs.

Thank you cards.

One of the main things in IMDD is that we create many different designs using photoshop. For example, I had to create a thank you card that represented what I liked and had a creative design. I kept my design simple by just  choosing a patterned background. I had the opportunity to choose a quote, but like I said I kept things simple by choosing to write thank you on the card. I had never used photoshop before this class and everything I had to learn was new. I learned how to add a background, words, edit the background, and much more.

Sponsorships & Businesses at the Olympics

I recently read a very interesting article on prdaily.com titled Brands winning big at London Olympics. It discussed social media and sponsorships during the Olympics this summer. Sponsorships are a big businesses, that bring in a lot of money.

 Although, these are being threatened due to social media. Each company has their own set of sponsorship rights protections in addition to a "brand exclusion zone" which extend for kilometers around venders preventing brands that aren't sponsors from displaying any ads or logos.

Online restrictions make things even more complicated by punishing fans for uploading pictures or videos onto public sites. Athletes may not comment on any competitors performance using twitter, facebook, or other social media. Also, they cannot promote any brand, product, or service, unless they are a sponsor.

The halo effect is said to have a positive effect on brands during the olympics. Many brands will get more business and attention to their brands. Consumers recognize brands from the olympics and USA team and will purchase them because the fact that they support them. So it makes them more favorable over similar products.

In addition to sponsor- event fit brand equity is one of the most important factors when measuring long term financial success of brand sponsors. Brand equity is the value a brand has over a generic competitor. Companies create this by making their brands memorable, recognizable.

Olympic sponsors should continue to be protected by the same laws. If they weren't it could jeopardize a companies success. Sponsors work very hard to support the Olympics and deserve the respect the earn for doing so.

Where it all begins...

I am currently a high school student in an interactive media and digital design class. I have created a blog to follow blogs i am interested in, and to create my own for classmates and others interested in what we are doing to read and follow along with what we do. We are only about five weeks into the school year, but that doesn't mean anything to us. From day one we took off. Working on projects, with clients(other students), and learning a bit about the business, and marketing world. Photoshop was one of the first things we tackled, with me never using photoshop before this was a little difficult, but with a little help from other students and teachers I got the hang of things pretty quickly. Next, we worked with prezi and started to learned the basics of marketing. We were given terms such as goods, public relations, co-branding, cooperative promotions, and many more. We had to find out the meaning of these terms. Then, we found pictures to describe the terms and put them in a prezi. It was a good project that helped us learn marketing basics. The things we have done so far have given us some expectations for the year and have started to help us learn to balance doing a couple different projects at once, and help with time management. I'm excited to see the outcome of this class and where i end up at the end of the year and I am hoping it will help me make a better decision for what i would like to do in college.