alicia mitchell

A blog I wrote as while interning with Mo Works, framing their experiences with clients into a help guide.

I love this article on “Hair dye and the hidden history of postwar America.” Particularly pertinent to me is the story of Ilon Specht and the origin of L’Oreal’s tagline: Because you’re worth it.

“We were sitting in this big office,” Specht recalls. “And everyone was discussing what the ad should be. They wanted to do something with a woman sitting by a window, and the wind blowing through the curtains. You know, one of those fake places with big, glamorous curtains. The woman was a complete object. I don’t think she even spoke. They just didn’t get it. We were in there for hours.”

She spoke about what it meant to be young in a business dominated by older men, and about what it felt like to write a line of copy that used the word “woman” and have someone cross it out and write “girl.”

“I could just see that they had this traditional view of women, and my feeling was that I’m not writing an ad about looking good for men, which is what it seems to me that they were doing. I just thought, Fuck you. I sat down and did it, in five minutes. It was very personal. I can recite to you the whole commercial, because I was so angry when I wrote it.”

“I use the most expensive hair color in the world. Preference, by L’Oreal. It’s not that I care about money. It’s that I care about my hair. It’s not just the color. I expect great color. What’s worth more to me is the way my hair feels. Smooth and silky but with body. It feels good against my neck. Actually, I don’t mind spending more for L’Oreal. Because I’m” -and here Specht took her fist and struck her chest- “worth it.”

There’s a lot of criticism around advertising creating the problem then selling the solution, particularly with regards to women’s bodies. And it’s fair. 

Advice I collected from the final Hungry Talks for the year, going into my final year as an Advertising student:

Reflect on: where you are now, where you would like to be when you graduate, then plan for your next steps.

Components of your future: what do I want? What does industry want? How can I get there?

When I ask myself where I want to be I freak out a little bit because I want to be everywhere at once. I want to be a creative and my history is in design. I know need to keep on top of things like UX design and digital content streams. There’s a drawing intensive offered at RMIT that looks like it would be useful for me - since leaving TAFE my drawing skills have plummeted.

Advice on getting internships:

use your connections

stay in contact

internships teach you stuff you can’t learn at uni

establish mentor relationships

look at ALL the agencies

make your cold-email memorable

—-*~*~*~*~*~THE NEW YORK STUDY TOUR *~*~*~*~*—--

Been Keenan’s How To Sell Your Work talk was infinitely helpful for problems I’ve encountered at work and at uni. The ability to sell what you’re doing is the most useful skill you can have.

Be prepared to start at the absolute bottom - be an apprentice who listens and asks questions; you’re not expected to know the answers yet, but you do need to be willing to learn and experiment. Genius is a myth: creativity is work. Don’t get frustrated when the rewards of professional creativity don’t match up to those of personal projects.

A point made that really resonated with me was that ideas are never yours: you recognise them rather than invent them. I felt like I was missing some deep well of one hundred percent original creative concepts inside me. It turns out that does not exist.

Clients aren’t just buying a finished product; they’re buying your process, your thinking. They are buying you to define and solve their problem. A problem well stated is a problem half solved: getting the question right is essential on any creative job.

A boring structure for your amazing creative work:

the brief/task/problem/opportunity

what does success look like/goals

what is the truth - show your reference to educate your client

the single-minded proposition

inspiration - normalise it

creative rationale - the problem, the truth, how this is going to solve it

the work

this is the right idea because: hammer it home, summarise your insights, your inspiration

Hungry Talks: Empowering the Creative was delivered by Nick Pearce from Homeless of Melbourne, Bonnie Shaw from FYA, and Kelsey Schwenk from Studio Thick. 

Kelsey Schwenk and Thick really stood out to me. She described her workplace as thick value: designing solutions that minimise harm and maximise good - not just not creating harm, but also creating good.

Thick is about impact design through digital and service design, building digital service models. “We can’t solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Their approach involves understanding what people are doing in the first place and/or why they’re not doing it The power of research: you can’t design for someone unless you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.

The case study presented on technology helping the blind to navigate the city was fantastic. Their solution involved facilitating services that already existed and were in use, rather than creating a whole new app, and their research allowed Thick to develop the best solution to the actual problem, not just the briefed problem.

“We had to learn it by doing it and that was the best way.”

I loved the Hungry Talk on Passion Projects. 

Emily Naismith talked about her Emoji Food Review project and how she was able to connect it to real-world job opportunities and give herself an edge. It’s a great idea that connects you to people.

The opening quote is from graphic designers Petrea Dickinson and Katarina Matic, who launched The Young Ones magazine while they were still studying. Starting a magazine has been a sort of dream project of mine for a long time - concerns about dying print media and drowning myself in uni work have held me back. Maybe it’s time for me to get going and find a niche to make it work. The concept of The Young Ones is fantastic and inspirational in itself, just adding to the fact that it is produced by female graphic designers (ah! my people!)

Key takeaway points from Hungry Talks: UX Unlocked:

Know thy user. Always come back to your audience, not just random people.

Demonstrate tangible bottom line for UX - ROI

UX is the perfect balance: the desire to create something beautiful, innovative and enjoyable for customers to use. It’s rational, analytical, and responsible.

After Berlei’s website implemented a UX-focused redesign, users interacting with added functionality are converting at 3 times site average, with 50% increased conversion rate on mobile.

Deloitte Digital is a consulting firm: business, creative, technology, digital. Here’s how UX is delivered in a consulting firm such as Deloitte Digital

Research. Question the problem statement.

Design. Create, envision. Clients are interested in how you are designing to solve their problems.

Delivery. Work ranges from experience principles, designing a research piece - trying to define problems.

When consulting, you need to understand the business as much as you can in a short amount of time next to people that’ve been there for years.

Every customer is a multi-channel customer, and UX is so much more than desktop versus mobile design. It’s about keeping in touch with valued users outside the website.

Some points on non-linear consumption of media:

Mass media, personal media - power rests with the consumer, when and how they engage.

Google is pushing ‘micromoments’ - no more hesitation to engage with a brand.

There are 41 thousand posts every second on Facebook.

UX is any engagement with the brand. There are many different touchpoints with the consumer. You need to research, come back many times, even days later to understand.

Key considerations for UX: 

What is the right journey for the consumer to go on?

How do we define success/what action do we want them to take?

You can’t do everything. Clients want to do everything, when budgets and brands make this impossible.

How do you understand the value of each touchpoint?

Digital strategy is just strategy! There is no such thing as exclusively offline.

Jasper Saudibin of OMD Sydney offered some great summaries of social media platforms:

Facebook has shifted from novelty to utility, and is the best platform for reaching an audience at a large scale. It can target specifically and precisely. Facebook functions best as a paid channel; organic reach really isn’t significant anymore. With paid, you get your effective targeting. There are 3 billion video views per day on Facebook.

One-third of online Australians use Instagram, which has been purchased by Facebook. Instagram’s content promotes inspiration and creativity. Users want an organic advertising experience on Instagram. The platform is a great place for social influencers to rise up.

Everyone’s talking about Twitter, but nobody’s on it (except me - I love twitter personally and professionally!). It’s not growing, but there’s a lot of niches on there rather than for the masses.

Snapchat is the space to watch, along with live-streaming services like periscope.

Facebook has recently opened its Messenger app API to businesses.

Looking towards what might be coming, there’s the popular Chinese app Wechat. It’s a messenger app by default, but is a platform at the same time.

Deconstructing a brief: “I have no special talents, I am just passionately curious.” Investigate!

Week 2 of Hungry Talks followed deconstruction of a Cannes Young Lion brief for Diet Coke, along with media buyer Maddie Leigh’s finalist entry. 

Be tapped into bigger broader cultural things that are going on and turn that information into something useful that is relevant for response to brief. Remember: consumers won’t always interact with media the way we do as industry people. It’s important to be actionable. It’s important to be able to bring the idea to life. 

Week 1 of RMIT’s Hungry Talks series featured Denstu Aegis Network’s MEIDEA program, “bridging the gap between industry + tertiary institutions”. 

Key qualities that popped up through the six speakers’ presentations were: responsible, inquisitive, ambitious, collaborative, agile, authentic, pioneering. The importance of the kind of person you are, the way you approach your work and your clients, and the way you work with other people, was stressed. As account manager Matt Soulsby said, don’t burn bridges. Everyone in the industry is interconnected and important. (Don’t be an asshole to work with).

The opportunity to hear from so many different branches of industry in one night is incredibly valuable in studying advertising - the different areas in which jobs exist that you may not even realise.