Mike Northfield's Marketing Blog

Video, photo, and graphic design have always been strong areas of interest to me. When I first heard that students would be producing a final video project in my Intro to Marketing course, I was excited at the opportunity to convey information using my creativity in ways that weren’t limited to PowerPoint, Prezi, and attempts at clever presentation taglines.

Visions of witty commercials, cinematic design, and professional effects filled my head while I prepared for our first team meeting to discuss the direction that our group would take the video in. After this meeting, however, I soon realized that my thoughts about the video’s potential were not at all on par with my teammates’ thoughts on the video.Since every person on our team had a different version of what they thought the video should look like, it took us a very long time to whittle them all down to one we could all feel a connection with.

Through the video project, I learned, and would still argue, that our team’s creative process became more difficult with an increase in the number of people that were involved in it; which almost seems counter-intuitive. I think that, in this particular instance, this may have been due to an overload in ideas, in addition to a lack of willingness to communicate honestly.

I think the true problem lay in the fact that our team was unable to communicate openly and comfortably about how we really felt about team member’s ideas. Many situations arose in which one teammate would suggest an idea but others in the group would have to mull over it for a while before unwillingly agreeing with it because they were resistant to potentially causing conflict. This awkwardness and reluctance to speak truthfully was a difficult problem to remedy. The fact that we knew that our team mates were going to evaluate our performance made us very careful around them. This fear of being disliked and potentially rated poorly could have been one of the reasons our team struggled to have honest open conversation.

In the end, however, I was extremely grateful for the product that our team managed to pull together and was ecstatic about not having to prepare a final presentation!

While browsing a search on “creative advertising” on Google today, I came across a large number of outdoor advertisements that I was impressed with and humbled by. One really caught my attention, however. Specifically an idea by UNICEF to market and sell “disease infested” water to the public. In an attempt to raise awareness for children who do not have proper access to clean water on a daily basis, UNICEF placed vending machines all over Manhattan that contained dirty water water rather than the usual bottled water, soda, or juice. People were encouraged to donate money to UNICEF through the vending machines or online to fund efforts to provide children in developing countries with clean water. The most interesting part about this campaign, however, is that it was actually very successful and spurred a lot of donations. UNICEF’s ability to relate numbers with examples (dirty bottled water) really helped people feel connected to the issue.

Even though this campaign is almost 5 years old, I think it is a great marketing concept. It engages the consumer in a way a normal advertisement might not. It would be interesting to see how a company might apply this advertisement concept to a product today; or if the concept might only be successful when used with a situation that is as sensitive as the one that UNICEF presented in this case…

• Article Link: Dirty Water Campaign