Mediabattle

By Matthijs Rotte on 13 February 2010

Last week students of the Universities of applied sciences Utrecht and Enschede took part in a media battle. The concept of the battle was quite simple; Five companies presented a real life case before the students which they had to find a solution to. The companies presented them with cases varying from funeral services to branding of a region. All this in only two and a half days time whilst working in teams of three or four. The challenge was on.

On Tuesday the pondering started. We stressed that our students should think in concepts first. What often happens in these kind crossmedial conceptual quests is that people start thinking of what channels they can use to get their message across. This is, in my opinion, a mistake. What makes a great crossmedial campaign a great crossmedial campaign is that we start thinking in a concept. After we got our concept and we thought of what we want to say and to whom, only then are we going to think in which channels we want to use to get our message across.

What I noticed when I was helping my students was that some of them started thinking in mediachannels first. The thing with doing this, is that your conceptual thinking is immediately limited to the channel you are using. And with choosing your channel first you unwillingly find yourself thinking in channel-clichés. For instance; if you think of television, you’re limited to a commercial or a tv-show. There’s nothing wrong with thinking like that if your goal is to make a tv-commercial or a tv-show. But in launching a new concept it is not enough to stick to one channel in my opinion, because of the fragmentation of traditional target groups, they’re not reachable in one place. Also the shift from push to pull marketing means that you cannot only use push channels.
This idea caught on really quick with our students. The results were above my expectations. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all students, the jury and the organizers for a great week!

For more information go to http://mediabattle.ning.com/

tagged with: target group, mediabattle, crossmedia

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