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MY COMPLETED MANIFESTO AND VOICE RECORDING(s)

It’s good to be a bit Wimpy.

We value quality, not quantity -

McDonald’s may do real fast food, sure, but we do real food, fast. 

We’re not a chain, we’re a family -

We keep our doors open late so that you always feel welcome.

We’re a bit Wimpy like that.

Our burgers are not just burgers,

They’re burgers you can’t get anywhere else.

We let our food speak for itself, we don’t speak for it. 

100% British Beef, cooked the way you like it -

Whether that’s charred or pink, we won’t judge.

We’re a bit Wimpy like that.

Our menu changes are few and far between; 

When you want a Big Bender, we’ll give you a Big Bender,

When you want a Pepsi Float, we’ll give you a Pepsi Float.

Whatever the day, whatever the decade.

Your favourites will never disappear.

We’re proud to be a bit Wimpy like that.

HEADLINE: ‘It’s good to be a bit Wimpy’

SIGN OFF/TAGLINE: ‘We’re proud to be a bit Wimpy like that.’ VOICE RECORDING ONE: MY MOTHERS VOICE VOICE RECORDING TWO: MY BROTHERS VOICE

...and 3, and 4, and 5, and 6-

ANOTHER ATTEMPT AT WRITING ABOUT MYSELF:

YET ANOTHER ATTEMPT AT WRITING ABOUT MYSELF:

Posting these here because I value showing my progress, but also trusting you to never show this to anyone else because they’re embarrassing as fuck and I hate them. It’s hard to write about yourself, no matter how I tried to do it I just ended up sounding like a damn prophet preaching to the masses from my little pedestal. It felt uncomfortable and like I was a know it all. Maybe one day I’ll try again, but for now I’ve gone off myself for a bit.

GIVING UP AND CHOOSING WIMPY:

REDOING WIMPY:

Paul’s feedback of my first Wimpy draft is that it’s too negative - in order to try and push the ‘we’re a bit Wimpy’ idea I actually made them sound pathetic and bigged up the competition, making Paul fancy a Maccas. Not ideal. The ‘We’re a bit Wimpy’ can be used in a contrasting way - calling them Wimpy about actually good traits. So I tried again:

DISCOVERING PAUL IS MY FATHER (and beginning manifestos)

LECTURE NOTES:

STARTING MY MANIFESTO:

The initial struggle I always face, like I did with the ad-redo homework, is choosing the brand I want to work with. In real life, this will be a lot easier, because I won’t get much of a choice, but when the world is your oyster you suddenly discover you care very little about quite a lot, to the point that you have no fond attachment to any brands. Or at least not any small brands, I clearly don’t support local businesses like the online-shopping hermit I am.  So, my limited investment in my community left me with the choices of an outdated fast food joint, a cupcake shop that’s super overpriced, and a woman’s house that she uses as a rescue to claim she’s not a cat lady.  Oh, and myself. 

The only two that stuck out from this selection as interesting were Wimpy, and myself (hah, ego much?) - but then I couldn’t decide. 

So I asked Paul. Turns out, asking Paul equals 5 seconds of asking your question, and then a subsequent 10-20 minutes of completely off topic discussions, wherein which I learnt that he wrote an article on why Jewish men are punching above their weight which pissed off a lot of Jewish men (namely because he’s right, my dad and mum are proof of that, though Jack, who is also Jewish, disagreed. Surprise surprise.), that he hates racism (always a good thing in my book), and that he is quite possibly my father. We bonded over our world views and our lack of care of alcohol but absolute love for Pina Coladas, and he asked me what my mum was doing 21 years and 9 months ago. I said I shall ask. 

Then he found out I liked cats and disowned me. On the bright side, he said I was a very interesting person, and to do my manifesto about me. Lost my dad, but gained an inch on my head. My initial thoughts were to, rather than write straight up about myself such as ‘Hi my name is Emily and blah blah blah bore the audience’, I would take something I feel strongly about and write about that instead. Initially, I floated to Paul that I could write about Emily as a collective, inspired by the Facebook group I’m in called ‘A group where you can only be Emily’, but he said it’d be hard to capture all Emily’s in 150 words. So I decided to write about the world view of writing.

WHO ARE MANIFESTOS FOR?

WHO ARE MANIFESTOS FOR? - LECTURE NOTES:

DIESEL - BE STUPID:

The Diesel manifesto was a bit on the edgy side - it was clear what they were trying to do, make themselves relatable and down to Earth, but it didn’t exactly translate to the page. It came across a bit like Boris Johnson trying to slum it with the kids he’s deprived of food and heating, skirting around the fact that actually, they’re not on the same level. It was also a bit heavy-worded - it took a long time to say a short point. 

APPLE - DIFFERENT TOGETHER:

Apple’s manifesto was similar to Diesel’s in it’s underlying message, which was that you don’t have to fit the societal norms, and in fact, don’t. However, Apple managed to say it in a much less Dad ‘I’m just like you young people’ way, and in much more succinct and universally relatable wording. They didn’t go heavy on the word-count, and kept it short and sweet, and it delivered. 

NIKE - PURPOSE MOVES US

This manifesto was way too short, and way too much of an oversell of their ethics. Everyone knows that Nike has unethical practices, such as lack of sustainability and poor work conditions in the locations their goods are produced, so trying to act like none of that is happening is just too big of a pill to swallow, nobody will take it. Clearly, Nike meant it as a suppository, you can tell they’ve been shoving this bullshit up their own asses. 

TASK ONE - ADIDAS MANIFESTO; LOCATE AND DEBATE

Adidas’s manifesto was in an interesting and surprising format, which was a video. This was pretty engaging at first, but got old quick, and I found it way more enjoyable to read the little screencaps that the creator had posted UNDER the video on his website. The tone of voice for the manifesto in the video was pretty confident, but bordering on overly confident, dipping into the murky waters of being ‘cocky’. And it went on. And on. With the same idea, too. 

NOTES:

After agonising for literally an entire lesson over which ad to choose and discovering my mind goes completely blank when under pressure and I know hardly any brands at all (at least ones that do print ads), so I ended up having one picked for me so I could escape my crippling indecision. The ad chosen for me was WWF’s really shit ad, Fish Forward:

The headings I chose to use for my creative territories/tone of voice chart were:

URGENCY

CHEEKY/HUMOROUS

POSITIVE/FUTURE ACTION

I could only think of three, sue me.

PLAN SPAM:

OUTCOME:

FEEDBACK:

TAGLINES/CALL TO ACTION

TASK ONE: WRITE A TAGLINE/CALL TO ACTION FOR AMAZON PRIME PREMIER LEAGUE AD

Our first task was to develop a tagline or a call to action for the Amazon Prime ads that were developed in the previous session and for homework. 

TAGLINE/CALL TO ACTION IDEA SPAM:

CLASS SUGGESTIONS AND FEEDBACK:

Both of my taglines (’The Ultimate Season Pass’ and ‘Every Games a Home Game’) were chosen as two of the most effective lines from the taglines section. However, the line ‘The Ultimate Season Pass’ was one where I again fell into the Americanisation trap, and Brian suggested it would be much better, and much more British to be ‘ticket’ instead of ‘pass’, which really, I should have known, considering how much money my dad wastes on a West Ham season ticket just to watch them lose nearly every other week for an entire year, all whilst complaining when I spend money makeup that actually gives me some joy in life. 

When it came to a call to action, I actually didn’t write one down for the class, as I struggled with writing one. I feel like I didn’t properly understand it (and didn’t ask, like a damn fool), and only began to fully grasp it when the lecture continued on through the feedback of others calls to action.

LECTURE NOTES:

WHOOPSIE I MISSED THIS - CATCH UP WORK

Due to being ill, I missed this work, and had to do it backwards after doing session six’s work, but it’s my blog and for the sake of continuity Day Five is going to come first, even though technically, for me, it came second.  The work set whilst I was away was to look at the relationship between copy and image, and how the two work in tandem to convey a message. The class were given an image of footballers celebrating a win, and told to come up with a headline for Amazon Prime’s new premier league access. After seeing everyone else’s work, it was actually really hard to try and come up with my own without being influenced by what I’d already seen, so I decided to progress onward with the next part of the work, and just reflect on other peoples work and listen to their feedback to inform my own future work in that department. The main points of feedback that people’s work received were:

Knowing the audience produces work that’s targeted - the people that spoke in the language of football fans demonstrated an understanding of who they were speaking to, and engaged with them on the same level. However, there is a fine line to tread here, and some people crossed it; you can go too far, and speak so much in the audience’s language that you isolate everyone else that doesn’t understand the references. Using phrases and terms commonly used by the audience is good, but sometimes playing on intricate inside jokes that require a lot of context can mean that you too closely limit your audience. The best headlines will speak to your audience, but be understood by all.

Most people included the word ‘Prime’ in their headline, and whilst puns can be golden, they’re not always appropriate, and can come across as tacky. You need to be sure you’re speaking to the audience and not just about the product, it’s a mix of both. 

SHORT FORM COPY CONTD.

TASK SET FROM PREVIOUS SESSION:

At the end of the previous session we were told to start thinking about our next mini-project, which is to rewrite a story in only 280 characters, but including all the speech lines from the original story (which was initially demonstrated in comic form). We had to write and re-write this multiple times in multiple tones of voice.  The most prominent bit of advice we were giving in terms of writing to a character/word limit is to not care about the word limit - at least at first. If you’re trying to structure what you haven’t written yet into a set amount of words, you’re never going to write anything, it’s too daunting of a task, and the blank page becomes even more intimidating than it already was. Just write. Get everything on the page, and you can chop it down later. It’s better to have more than less, because it’s easier to take stuff out than add something in.

My first story was a bit of a trial and error with mostly error - it was a bit boring, but it was something to get me going, and it helped me see what wasn’t working, which is always just as important as knowing what’s working. 

My second story was based on my grandparents and their pathetic little arguments they have on the daily, always about the same fucking thing. I tried to capture how annoying it is to listen to.

OTHER EXAMPLES:

My last story was one where I tried to break up the mould I’d been stuck in of using completely predictable environments. 

My biggest struggle with this task were both the character-count and idea generation. I got caught up on the ‘story’ aspect and immediately jumped a prose-like format, and looking at other peoples examples when the class shared their stories showed me how boxed in I’d been, not really branching far out to experiment. Adopting a more prose-like stance also meant that sticking within the character-count was difficult, and I was barely under on each one.  WHAT HAVE WE LEARNT? - SUMMARY NOTES

SHORT FORM COPY

WHAT IS COPYWRTING FOR? - LECTURE NOTES:

TASK ONE: PRINT AD ANALYSIS 

The look at the basic structure of short form copy, we were giving newspapers and instructed to find an ad which could demonstrate a headline, body copy, and a call to action. We looked an ad for O2 as an example in our paper, and then looked for another ad that followed the same structure, settling on one for Coventry’s online university courses. 

HEADLINE; BODY COPY; CALL TO ACTION - LECTURE NOTES:

Our homework task was to rename the Vespa Elettrica in 3 ways - One for men, one for women, one that’s unisex. The begin research for this, I looked at Vespa itself - it’s current ranges and it’s history. Vespa has always named it’s scooters something Italian, and I wanted to try and keep with that as much as possible, at least in the aesthetic of the word, as this seemed like an important part of their branding and identity. They pride themselves on being free and being for speed, boasting about their racing ties. 

I then split up by demographic, looking at why men AREN’T buying Vespa’s, and why women ARE buying vespas, as it seems as though their main demographic of buyers is women - so what isn’t appealing to men? I found a website that’s dedicated to all things manly  (hyperlinked for your viewing pleasure) and telling men what’s manly, helping them to protect their maniliness (yes, websites like these actually exist) - on this site, it had an entire article dictating why men are not attracted to Vespa’s, and mostly, it’s because they’re feminine in both appearance and sound. Yes, sound. That is apparently a bit thing for guys. Sound. Vespa’s don’t make that sexy and ‘I’ve got a massive schlong’ vroom vroom that a motorcycle does. 

Women on the other hand are attracted to Vespa’s on account of the idea of the perfect, idyllic Italian summer thats romanticised in movies. They want the scooter through the cobbled streets with a scarf around their head, and they want the sexy Italian man that sweeps them off their feet in a steamy romance. They want the adventure, the fantasy.

WOMEN:

CREATIVE RATIONALE:

Capturing the sound of Italy, whilst promising an immersion in life. Using the newfound soundlessness of the Vespa to give women the fantasy of plunging into life and living through their surroundings in an ethereal, escapist way.

MEN:

CREATIVE RATIONALE:

Challenging the perception of loud = big, and inverting the need for sound as compensation to make it so that men feel threatened by loud engines, as if it outs them as making up for what they don’t have. Promoting silence as confidence.

UNISEX:

CREATIVE RATIONALE:

A feeling you can’t describe, a feeling you have to experience for yourself - highlighting Vespa as the vehicle that lets you live the journey, not just take it, and bringing silence into the forefront by painting sound as the wall that blocks us from seeing the small wonders of every day life.

FEEDBACK - INDIVIDUAL AND CLASS:

My feedback was that the line for the women’s vespa - ‘For those quiet nights out’ - is not really a tagline for the brand, or this scooter, but rather it’s the tagline for a campaign, or the idea for a campaign. It’s good, just not for what I was using it for. 

NAMES AND TAGLINES

DEVELOPING OUR APPLE PERSONA

In order to develop the persona’s we began to work on in the previous session, we were tasked with assigning them more personality traits (both positive and negative), and phrasing these in single line phrases. It sounded pretty simple at first, until you sit down and actually have to do it, and then, turns out it’s definitely not easy. For a good while, my team were staring at a blank page, and none of us could agree on a direction. We also couldn’t really agree on the specifics of the task. In part, some people were getting too caught up on the literal aspects of the persona, trying to write a paragraph with the bare basic facts such as age, height, where they came from, which lead to a lot of road-blocks as trying to cram in that information made everything disjointed and difficult to work around. 

We had some of the bare essential traits down, such as Apple being a gold-digger, a people pleaser, a social butterfly, a lightweight, educated, and so on, but just couldn’t come together to find ways of working them into sentences and phrases to describe Apple, so we broke off and began to try and write things on our own. My lines are below:

My feedback for these lines was that the line ‘You worth is as much as you spend’ was the strongest line, and stood out amongst the rest, as Paul and Brian said that Apple attracts customers on a purely transactional basis.

NAMES AND TAGLINES: LECTURE NOTES:

MINI TASK: CREATIVE RATIONALE FOR COKE ZERO VS COKE LIGHT

As a mini task, we had to look at the products of Coca-Cola Light and Coca-Cola Zero - these are the same product in content, but sold separately under different names. The reason for this is that Coca-Cola Light was marketed more towards women, and wasn’t appealing to men, so Coca-Cola Zero was released to target men.

TASK ONE: NIKE VS ADIDAS VS UNDER ARMOUR Our first big task of the lecture was to compare the brands of Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour, which are all sportswear brands in essence, and find the differences and what sets them apart from each other. 

As groups, we shared our best lines with the class for Under Armour - our groups was up there as one of the voted on choices, with a few small tweaks:

Made to be used not shown could be shortened to simply ‘used not shown’.

TASK TWO: FIXING GOOGLES TAGLINE Google originally had a good tagline, which was ‘Don’t be evil’ (also included in their code of conduct) - however, in 2015, Google’s parent company Alphabet changed it to “Do the right thing”, which is definitely not as Google-y. Because of this, Brian tasked us with coming up with our own new tagline for Google. My ideas are below, with my finals bolded:

And the ones we all compiled and voted on:

HOMEWORK: RENAME THE VESPA ‘ELECTRIC’ BECAUSE IT’S FUCKING SHIT

WHAT IS COPYWRITING?

INTRODUCTION:

To introduce us to the topic of Copywriting, guest lecturer and Copywriter Paul Burke talked us through his ideas about writing, how he got to where he is, his practices, and some of the projects he’s worked on. One of my favourite things about this industry is the people - in Fashion, everyone was a Certain Type of person, and you felt like you had to be the same Type to be accepted. Everything felt fake, but I guess that you inevitably end up walking like a Barbie with a stick wedged up your ass at all times. In the advertising industry, I’ve yet to meet someone that isn’t just themselves, unashamedly (even if sometimes, they should probably be a bit ashamed) - it makes the advice they give so much more valuable, because you value what they’re saying and them as people. Their experiences seem attainable, not isolating. 

For the most part, Paul’s advice revolved around the process of writing - how to gauge timing and pace, how to know when you’re finished, and the basics like knowing correct grammar. 

One of the pieces of advice he gave in his talk that stuck with me the most was the following:

"Always make the most of the brief, get the brief as early as you can and work as late as you can. You should finish when the brief is finished." - it counters everything everyone has always taught me throughout school about not going to the wire (not that I ever listened to that in the first place). If you don’t use all the time available to you, you never know what could have been, you’ve never produced the best work you can because you’ve settled on the first good idea. 

FIRST TASK: INTRODUCTION TO TONE OF VOICE The first task we were assigned was to choose a brand to semi-personify - to do this, we were to extract key aspects of their ethos and turn them into personality traits under the prompt of ‘Your brand turns up at a party - what tone of voice would they use?’ My group chose Apple, because we’re clearly generic as fuck with limited imagination. 2-3 other tables also chose Apple, but just know that we definitely chose it first, I can prove that, 100%.

For our homework, we were tasked with making a portrait for our brand - in all honesty, I didn’t do it, because I’m shit at drawing and everything I drew didn’t look like Apple the brand at all. It did, however, look vaguely apple-the-fruit shaped. Vaguely. If you squinted. 

My ideas for Apple’s dirty little secret stemmed more from physical things about their products. I chose ‘low battery’ to translate to low-social battery, a direct correlation between the fault of their products where the battery is fucking shit and dies before you have a chance to wait for your app to load. All those movies where the call cuts out in crucial scene and the poor protagonist doesn’t get to say goodbye to their dying love? That’s because they were using Apple phones.

My second idea for Apple’s dirty little secret was ‘exclusivity’, which could extend to being a bit bitchy and cliquey, only hanging around certain kinds of people. This pertains to Apple’s ever growing agenda to make their product solely compatible with other Apple products, such as removing the headphone jack, and making it so that only Apple headphones are able to be used on Apple phones, unless you buy an adaptor. 

SECOND TASK: ELECTION SELECTION

Our second task was also group based, looking at the difficulty of naming in branding. We were told to create a Prime Minister candidate as groups, giving them a full name, and a personality. Our group went with Theodore (Ted), and completely fucked ourselves over with that name choice (which I suggested, whoops) - Ted is an American name, a lot of people in the UK wouldn’t get behind him, he doesn’t sound British (which I mean, Ted Heath anybody? Maybe it’s just ‘Theodore’ that was the step too far). Paul’s advice was that if he was an Ed, he’d have been much better. Other than that he was a solid candidate. As his mother, I feel ashamed for ruining his chances with my naming abilities. 

THIS PROJECT DIDN’T LIKE ME AND I DIDN’T LIKE IT EITHER.

I definitely struggled with this project, and I know why - I know where I had my falls and where I fucked up. Visuals have never been my strongest aspect, nor the aspect I ever have any interest in doing; I put all my energy into my research and my strategy, and drop the ball when it comes to actually producing the outcomes needed to bring my project to a conclusion. I was steered in the direction of copywriting and strategy in the past year, and told to keep my visuals super simple so that those two things can shine through it and be my main body of work, but when confronted with a project that puts emphasis on the visuals, I overwhelmed myself and bit off more than I could chew in the timeframe I had available to me. This is definitely a project where I should have either kept it very simple content wise, or worked in a group with someone who excels in visuals and maybe falls flat in their strat, so that we could have shared the work 50/50 and collaboratively come out with a solid bulk of work. Getting back into the rhythm of class after months being away, and retaining the momentum and progress I achieved last year has definitely been difficult - it’s felt like starting an engine on a vintage car that hasn’t been driven in years, and I think clawing my way back up to the point I was at last year is definitely going to take some stops and starts, and some trips and falls, but that’s just how the creative process works. Not everything can be a win, and this project just wasn’t the one for me, son.

But I bit off more than I could chew, and didn’t spit it out. I continued to struggle through it because some work is better than no work, and I knew if I backtracked and tried to start from scratch with such a small amount of time left, I’d panic and get further behind and end up having nothing to show for it. I’m proud that I was able to put some work out into the world, but not proud of what work I’ve put out into the world. Social media, whilst being perceived as being fast paced, actually needs time to stew in order to engage an audience and get the reaction and responses you want - you can’t put out little content and expect a lot back, you have to pile it on and keep at it to get the results you desire, which was where I fell behind and got lost. I didn’t leave myself enough time to push out enough content to keep on stirring up engagement and get myself a foothold with my target audience. The engagement I got was minimal, at best, and nonexistent on some platforms entirely. I stubbornly refused to use other peoples content because it felt lazy to me to do so, and I didn’t want to ride on the coattails of others and fall into this trap of being able to use what other people have produced and then fall out of motivation to produce anything myself, but in this day and age stealing content from other people to use on your page is fine, it’s what everyone does. Brands capitalise on memes, repost from people who use their products to make themselves look more authentic and approachable - it’s all part of the strategy of inserting yourself into an online community and getting a basis there to start pushing out your own content that they’ll then be more inclined to engage with. 

LAST MINUTE IDEA. 

Thanks Mum, she thought of this one. Using her Dune box from the boots she recently bought, we had one last ditch attempt to get some engagement on Instagram - before my Challah shoes completely fell apart, too. I put the shoes in the Dune box, and presented them as a new purchase, and uploaded the image to Instagram. It’s the image that has definitely gotten the most likes out of everything that I’ve uploaded so far, excluding Junaid from all the results because he’s ruining my experiments (5 likes total, 4 excluding Junaid). Whilst some seem to be from my target audience, others seem to be from elsewhere, including a makeup blogger who god knows why they’re here.

I also took photos of my breaking Challah shoes, and messaged a complaint to Dune about how unsatisfied I am with my latest purchase. Predictably, they didn’t reply. Typical, big corporations never want to admit to their wrongdoings. 

REDDIT RESULTS - EVEN WHEN YOU DON’T GET BANNED, YOU DON’T NECESSARY GET LIKED (OR UPVOTED)

With Reddit, I followed Steve’s advice and played by the rules - turns out this was shit advice, because even when I played by the rules I wasn’t allowed to post my content. I found two Jewish groups that were a lot less serious about the religion than others - /jewdank and /judaism. I read both of their rules, and posted the same picture and same caption in both groups. /jewdank gave me no results whatsoever; merely a single upvote that I got super excited about until I realised I’d accidentally upvoted myself when trying to refresh. 

/judaism wouldn’t even let me post - they have a bot that automatically deletes posts by new users to prevent spam, and you have to message the admins to get your post approved, which I did. And despite me having sat there and read all there rules (of which there are a lot, Jesus Christ), and ensuring my post cleared all the rules and was acceptable, they told me it wasn’t the kind of content they’d approve anyway. So personally, I think they’re assholes who need to either update their rules, or make them more explicit.

RESULTS FROM TUMBLR POSTS

Like with my new Instagram posts, I adjusted my tone of voice on Tumblr, being a little more perky, more approachable, less serious. Also with Tumblr, I was less indirect about my intentions, and was very open with admitting that my blog will just document me showing my devotion to Challah by wearing it in my day to day life. Tumblr is a bit less serious than Instagram, favouring ‘shitposts’ over aesthetics, so there wasn’t much reason to play pretend when being open about the fact that I was just having a bit of a shit and a giggle would probably go down better in this scene. 

For my header and profile picture, I also re-used imagery from my Instagram, as it seems appropriate for icons and headers due to its gaudy nature. 

My engagement from Tumblr ended up being virtually non-existent. I used the queue system to schedule my posts to be roughly in the time range that is predicted to have the most traffic, but only one of my posts got any attention, which was my final photo set of my brother wearing his Challah slippers and ‘loafing around’. This was reblogged by one blog that has a good chunk of follows (around 2k, nothing extreme), but even then that sparked only 2 extra notes - both likes, no further reblogs. This is a pretty disappointing result, but Tumblr is very community based and it takes some time to build up a good following and have people engage - I spent years on Tumblr slowly climbing my way up in followers and engagement, and still never really triumphed. I didn’t leave myself enough time to properly embed myself in this community and be able to get the response I’d been wanting. 

As you can see, interaction was scarce. I used the queue system to make sure my posts were uploaded within one of the peak times I found through my research - 4am-7am EST. Even so, not much resulted from my uploads. I tried to use the most popular tags for the Jewish community to get my posts into circulation (the hashtags recommended to me by Tumblr itself based on the amount of posts and interactions that occur within said tags), but my efforts amounted to 3 likes, and 1 reblog, across two posts. One post with 3 notes (2 likes a reblog), and one post (my first post), with one like. The post with one like is from one of Tumblr’s out and proud bots. Probably just to encourage me to keep going on Tumblr. 

SHOOT THREE