The day before the presentation, Emily, Ash, Zack and myself came in for the whole day to work on presentation rehearsals, attend 2 lectures and work on our handout booklet.
We added all the content we were going to cover however the narrative of the presentation was all over the place and it didn’t really pitch the brand in a way I was happy with. After reviewing it, we changed nearly all the slides to be supportive and coherent of the brand the whole way through. For example on the brand slide it said as the two bullet points “Why this brand theme?” and “Why it works?”. That just simply didn’t sell the idea or from a clients perspective didn’t really open very strong.
Instead we changed it to this. It had our brand strap-line, our key words that describe the brand, the main hash-tag for our social media campaign and finally our logo. Ashley also sharpened his notes so they were more coherent and simply elaborated on the first slide. It was a much stronger start and we were happy with it.
In my part I wanted to make sure we showed the diversity of our logo and from a professional standpoint show how it could work in different colours / backgrounds. I also wanted to show our development of the logo which could have come across FAR better and should have really had it’s own slide but its the restrictions of Prezi and time that denied that idea. Going back however I would make sure I go into the development of it a bit more. The logo development shows our initial idea and our final idea for the logo (making the design flat) which is the strongest of all our mock-ups in my professional opinion.
The same was for my sections that I was going to present for which were logos, posters and merchandise. However it truly showed when Andrew Love one of our course tutors/lecturers reviewed our presentation and basically told us that our brand theme was potentially quite weak and unintentionally unappealing to the demographics we were targeting. Mostly because whilst not quite hitting our target audience we seemed to have alienated the actual gamer demographic as well. He came up with ideas however how to spin what we have (as the presentation was tomorrow and a re-brand wasn’t going to happen in time) to make it more appealing to our target demographic.
So for example, he gave us the idea of looking at our existing content and try to link it to gaming like the marbles he made a link to Candy Crush which I wouldn’t have seen until he mentioned it! He thought the logo wasn’t very strong either with our current pitch and he was right as I hadn’t mentioned our influences for it. Which as previously mentioned was the National Geographic logo and the Aperture Logo from Portal the game. Now it’s difficult to make amendments in Prezi the way you want them and unfortunately that’s one of the restrictions of using it as a presentation median as I would have liked to have added examples alongside everything I was comparing them against for it to connect with our target audience. Though we weren’t able to do that, perhaps we should have got feedback a few days before to allow us some room to perhaps get these changes in earlier from a lecturer.
One of the main challenges from then onwards was to spin what we had to bridge the gap and connect our demographics. So for example in this poster whilst a non-gamer sees dice and game board pieces a gamer may see dice to roll loot for in World of Warcraft and the game pieces as units in Civilizations. So what Andrew Love commented on really got us thinking and sharpening our concept and to be fair Deborah Tuck our course leader also commented on the exact same thing. So it was a consensus our brand theme for these changes was confused and didn’t really quite connect. I truly believe now we have a VERY strong brand theme that will connect with the client to hit all their target demographics. This is basically the same work but it’s how we spin it to the client and get them to connect to the work and in the real world, get them to commission this work. It’s actually taught a very good lesson for the real word and when watching Mad Men the tv show it’s what they do for their clients as well even if they think it’s a bad idea they try their hardest to get the work to connect with the client and make them believe it truly meets their needs. Whether it truly does or not are assumptions as until it’s live in the field nobody can truly know it’s final effectiveness.
Finally the booklet, myself, Ashley and Zack stayed very late to get this what was turning out to be a beautiful booklet finished. We came up with many formatting issues and page order issues trying to ready for print as certain pages needed to be in unorthodox orders so that when it’s printed it comes out right. Unfortunately when we got the university printers they refused us entry because they were too swamped for the day and asked to us to come back at 8.30am in the morning…defeated we accepted the challenge and called it a day.
Besides the booklet the final thing to finalise was my cue cards and I made sure to add bullet points so I could just elaborate on them as I always do. Though my normal style is elaborate from what’s on the slides as that was what I was used to when I was a business advisor. However what I learnt from our dry run on Wed/Thur is that won’t work with this time restricted presentation as I tend talk / waffle too much. So we all agreed my part needed more structure and I came up with 5 cure cards which should help me with my 3.5 minute slot.