Date of Defense
12-4-2020
Date of Graduation
12-2020
Department
Marketing
First Advisor
Karen Lancendorfer
Second Advisor
Greg Gerfen
Abstract
Adobe is a creative, innovative company that works to transform how people learn, work, play, and do business through digital experiences. Adobe provides everything people need in order to design and deliver digital experiences. Adobe is powered by their three cloud-based solutions including Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Document Cloud, and Adobe Experience Cloud. Adobe asked students to create an integrated marketing campaign for the NSAC American Advertising Federation Case held in April 2020 to raise awareness for the Adobe Experience Cloud. The Adobe Experience Cloud provides an end-to-end customer experience management solution for experience creation across advertising, marketing, analytics, and commerce. It is designed to help enterprises build marketing campaigns, manage digital advertising, and gain deep intelligence about business performance. The team consisted of the advertising and promotion senior students led by professor, Dr. Karen Lancendorfer, at Western Michigan University. Together, they formulated a full integrated marketing campaign for Adobe to increase brand awareness for the Adobe Experience Cloud.
They began by analyzing and creating the media plan for Adobe in small groups. In order to create this media plan, groups needed to do extensive reach and analysis, competitive consideration, creative use of the budget, realistic objectives, media classes and vehicles, and good justification for decisions and recommendations. After taking all these elements into consideration, they worked to create a media plan that consisted with an executive summary, situation analysis, media objectives, rationales and strategies, media schedule, media plan evaluation, and appendix.
They then spilt the team into advertising department groups and allowed them to focus in on a particular area of advertising for the campaign. Michelle was part of the creative team that was made up of copywriters and art directors. The set-up for the creative team simulated a real-life workplace environment. They brainstormed creative ideas together and talked about how to turn them into reality. Together, they created the big idea for the campaign called “Bring Your A Game.” They then created different advertisements for this campaign including internet/digital/mobile/social media, public relations, direct marketing/email programs, and lifestyle/event promotions. These advertising elements were created by using Adobe’s large variety of color guides, typography, imagery, alternative typography, and logos to create the perfect Plansbook.
As a team, they readjusted to the difficulties that were faced transitioning into an online course but were able to bring all the elements together and successfully create the entire campaign along with the completed Plansbook. After the completion of the Plansbook, a small group of the team worked hard to create a PowerPoint presentation for the campaign and then practiced and perfected speeches that they recorded and presented for the National Student Advertising Competition and was submitted to judges on April 9, 2020. They may not have placed in the district, but overall, the campaign was a success. While working on this campaign, the team was able to bring their ideas together, use their innovation, and skills to learn how to formulate an integrated marketing campaign from start to finish. Overall, these elements together created a successful campaign that has truly made the National Student Advertising Competition a personal accomplishment.
Recommended Citation
Halagian, Michelle, "National Student Advertising Competition: Formulating an Integrated Marketing Campaign for Adobe" (2020). Honors Theses. 3356.
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/honors_theses/3356
Access Setting
Honors Thesis-Restricted