Date of Defense

4-20-2020

Date of Graduation

4-2020

Department

Business - Interdisciplinary

First Advisor

Karen Lancendorfer

Second Advisor

Greg Gerfen

Abstract

Adobe, a nine billion dollar company, has reconstructed the digital experience for their customers by integrating innovative technology and their core values to create better business solutions. They asked students across the nation to compete in an integrated marketing campaign for the NSAC American Advertising Federation Case held in April 2020. The client provided each team with background information on the company, the scope of their business, their primary objectives, target audience, and a generous four million dollar budget. Our team was composed of senior Advertising and Promotion students led by Dr. Karen Lancendorfer at Western Michigan University. Together, our team researched, strategized, and fully designed the campaign we thought would be best implemented by Adobe.

My role as one of two lead strategists was to start researching the data that would form the foundation of our campaign. Unlike competitions in past years, this year Adobe requested a business to business instead of business to consumer campaign. The strategy team decided that breaking into two groups was the best method to tackle the sheer amount of data that needed to be collected. My team handled the situation analysis. First, we dove deeper into the company history to find their differentiating characteristics. Next, the team focused on industry analysis as a whole finding that from 2014 to 2019, the digital advertising industry, including adtech solutions such as Adobe Experience Cloud, grew at an annualized rate of 16.8% (IBIS World, 2019). This allowed for plenty of growth in awareness.

After the initial company and industry analysis was completed, I handled the social listening for Adobe. This was aided by sites such as social mention, ubersuggest, and SEMrush. I was able to collect sentiment scores. likability of the brand, as well as gather insights into popular keyword searches, and the target audience. From this research we were able to confirm the target audience as being 35--54 year olds who are already part of the advertising industry - specifically media.

Our final piece of research was analyzing the primary data. In an unaided awareness measure, we found that only 18% of respondents indicated that Adobe came to mind first when thinking about ad tech software. The majority of responses indicate that Adobe is the brand that comes to mind with content creation instead of ad tech which our creative team worked to change. Due to COVID-19, our team was unable to present in person. Instead, a dedicated group of students filmed themselves presenting the case competition and submitted it to judges on April 9, 2020.

Access Setting

Honors Thesis-Restricted

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