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Guerrilla Advertising

Wikipedia guerrilla marketing1

I only remembered at lunch time yesterday that WBD was less than 24 hours away! So I was really impressed that it only took 20 minutes sitting on the floor outside my classroom with a couple of my Junior Certs & voilá – we planned a promo ; swore a solemn oath of secrecy; made a shopping list (blue tack, string, balloons, markers, bed sheet) & we were ready! Here’s the video of our escapades from earlier today:

[youtube_sc url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuzvONks7Q0]

This all tied in very neatly with what we’d been covering in class recently:

Media Studies

It also led to me discussing, on a completely impromptu basis (because of the buzz our event created) the basics of guerrilla marketing campaigns with several of my classes today. Here’s what we came up with as a guide to created a successful campaign:

RULES FOR GUERRILLA ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS

  1. Secrecy – the element of surprise if crucial. Whatever you plan, it’s vital that no-one suspects anything.
  2. Unexpected event – try to do something new & original so people’s curiosity is piqued.
  3. Unexpected location – choose a public location where random madness is rare: a church, a train station, a hospital, a courthouse – but try not to get arrested!
  4. Rapid – keep it short! Those who are there must feel they were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. Those who hear about it afterwards must feel like they missed out!
  5. Planning – if you’re going to appear, do your thang & disappear, all in the space of 7 / 8 minutes, you’d better be sure everything’s ready in advance. As well as our shopping list, we agreed to leave the corridor untouched until after the 10.35 class began, then we transformed it so that when students emerged from neighbouring classrooms at 11.15, their environment had transformed utterly. Our lovely caretaker Mark also brought along a ladder & hung the balloons from the ceiling so we had no health & safety concerns to deal with!
  6. Message – there’s no point in having a memorable event, if nobody remembers what the event was promoting. Sticking the World Book Day vouchers – hundreds of them – on the walls made delivering our message pretty easy. Signs, posters, leaflets or props are a must.
  7. Respect – originally we discussed walking the corridors engrossed in a book & deliberately bumping into people, then wishing them a Happy World Book Day & handing them a voucher! However, we quickly decided against this. You don’t want people avoiding your event, you want them flocking towards it, but this must be a choice they want to make, so invading their personal space is a bad idea…
  8. Film It – the whole idea is to create a novel experience that people want to photograph / film and share on social media. This way you can reach thousands more, not just those who happened to be there! However, the video you create will probably be more professional & cover more camera angles than snippets of videos created by on-lookers so make it your priority to film from a few different angles. I was sorry afterwards we hadn’t gotten better reaction shots as people came in but without a zoom on our flip cams, there wasn’t a lot we could do! I blame our crappy equipment 😉 I was also sorry we hadn’t gotten an establishing shot of the corridor as it is normally so that you had a “before” and “after” effect. The better the video (content, originality, relevance to your life, and particularly if it’s funny!!!) the more likely it will be shared. The more it’s shared the more views it gets and the more successful your campaign has been.

As an aside, guerrilla marketing came up on the 2013 Junior Cert English Paper 1, in the media studies section.

Wikipedia Guerrilla Marketing2

 

Leaving Cert students were asked to write out the text to accompany an ad for a house as a QB in 2003 so there’s every chance something like this could come up in the exam. Plus, when you’re settled into college next year & you’ve got a part time job in promotions working for the Students Union Ents Crew, this might come in very useful indeed 😉

Descriptive Writing Tip 3

5 senses =  3 S’s – sight, sound, smell & 2 T’s – taste & touch.

Blind people experience the world as a rich tapestry of sounds, smells, textures and tastes. Just because they are blind does not mean their life is any less intense but they have tuned in to a way of seeing the world that does not need eyes.

This is what you need to do as a writer. If you are describing a place, imagine that you walked into that space blindfolded. Would you still know where you were? How? Close your eyes and imagine the sounds and smells, the taste of the air, the fabrics and gels and the feel of the furniture that would indicate to you where you were even if you could not see…

Here’s an example of descriptive writing which relies on sound, smell, texture & taste.

The clink of instruments falling into metal trays and the cloying smell of drills and disinfectant filled me with despair. I was back here again, in the place from all of my nightmares, but this time was real. Now I shimmied onto the cold blue leather and the whirr as the motorised chair came to life added to my rising panic. As it stretched out beneath me, I too opened my jaws until they ached with the effort; tasted the powder of the tight white gloved hand as it pulled at the corner of my mouth; squeezed my eyes shut and dug my fingernails into the soft palm of my trembling hand to distract myself from the pain. Here it comes, here it comes, the prick and the sting and the cold cold kiss of the needle, then the flooding numbness, and the feeling of temporary relief, all too soon destroyed by the searing screech of the drill as it spins hideously closer. Save me, I want to scream, but I’m already almost choking on my own spit, pooling at the back of my mouth. I wiggle my eyebrows at the nurse and she obligingly slips in the suction tube to stop me from drowning. Why is it, I ask myself, as I stare at the ceiling, weary and numb and exhausted, that a visit to the dentist always feels like a brush with death?”

Right, not here it is again, but this time colour coded:

sounds = blue    smells = green    taste = pink    touch = orange 

The clink of instruments falling into metal trays and the cloying smell of drills and disinfectant filled me with despair. I was back here again, in the place from all of my nightmares, but this time was real. Now I shimmied onto the cold blue leather and the whirr as the motorised chair came to life added to my rising panic. As it stretched out beneath me, I too opened my jaws until they ached with the effort; tasted the powder of the tight white gloved hand as it pulled at the corner of my mouth; squeezed my eyes shut and dug my fingernails into the soft palm of my trembling hand to distract myself from the pain. Here it comes, here it comes, the prick and the sting and the cold cold kiss of the needle, then the flooding numbness, and the feeling of temporary relief, all too soon destroyed by the searing screech of the drill as it spins hideously closer. The smell of powdered rubble as my mouth becomes a war zone chokes my nostrils. Save me, I want to scream, but I’m already almost drowning in my own spit, pooling at the back of my mouth. I wiggle my eyebrows at the nurse and she obligingly slips in the suction tube. Why is it, I ask myself, as I stare at the ceiling, weary and numb and exhausted, that a visit to the dentist always feels like a brush with death?”

[***Note: there is some overlap between taste and touch. For example, you taste the cold but it’s also a sensation, so you can touch something and know it’s cold – it doesn’t have to be a taste!]

If I take out the sounds, smells, tastes, and touch sensations, this is what the description becomes:

As I walked in I saw metal trays and instruments, drills and bottles of disinfectant. I was back here again, in the place from all of my nightmares, but this time it was real. I saw the cold blue leather of the motorised chair and my panic began to rise. As it stretched out, I too opened my jaws, saw the tight white gloved hand as it moved towards my mouth; shut my eyes to distract myself from the pain. Here it comes, here it comes, the long needle, then the feeling of temporary relief, all too soon destroyed by the sight the drill as it spins hideously closer. I see powder rising from my open mouth as the drill digs deeper. Save me, I want to scream, but as I glance down I can see spit dribbling out of the corner of my mouth. I open my eyes wide to catch the nurse’s attention and she obligingly slips in the suction tube. Why is it, I ask myself, as I stare at the ceiling, weary and numb and exhausted, that a visit to the dentist always feels like a brush with death?”

There’s nothing wrong with this sight-only description but it doesn’t draw you in as convincingly because the focus is ONLY on what I can see, rather than giving the full five senses experience, which is what most of us are lucky enough to experience on a daily basis.

Studied poetry: mistakes.

  1. Ignoring the question: if you are asked for a personal response to a poet’s work, every paragraph must contain at least two sentences which include the word “I”. If you are given a statement to discuss, keep using the words from the question (and synonyms) and showing how what you’re discussing is relevant to the question asked. Don’t just rewrite the question at the end of every paragraph and hope this will do – it won’t!

  2. Writing the name of the poem incorrectly (or worse getting the name of the poem wrong!). When you write the name of a poem, use capital letters and quotation marks eg “The War Horse”, “A Constable Calls”

  1. Lack of quotes! The sure sign of a bluffer. Quotes provide proof that you

    (a)know the poems and (b) can back up any statements you make with concrete evidence.

  1. Quotes at the beginning of sentences/paragraphs. Never write down the quote and then comment on it. This suggests you’re just throwing the quote on the page and then making up something to say about it. Bad idea! The rule is statement FOLLOWED by quote. This way you show you are in control of what you want to say.
  1. Telling the STORY of the poem – sum up what the poem is about in ONE or two sentences. Leave it at that. Your job is to analyse the way the ideas are expressed (techniques), the feelings the poem contains & creates in you, the way ideas recur and develop from poem to poem. Comment on the ideas rather than just saying what ideas the poem contains.

  1. Lack of personal response! You need to show that studying this poet has changed your perspective on life, taught you something valuable, opened your eyes to an issue you had previously ignored, provoked an emotional response, connected to something in your own life. Your job is to convince the reader that this poet is worth a closer look. However, don’t ramble off on a tangent about yourself (there was this one time, at band camp… yawn!). Ultimately you are offering a detailed analysis of the poetry, not a diary of your life. A good rule of thumb is to confine personal response to two sentences per paragraph.

  1. Long rambling sentences, paragraphs that sprawl to over a page, pointless repetition. Try to form the sentence in your head before you write it down. DO NOT vomit onto the page. If you can say what you need to say neatly and concisely in 2 sentences instead of 6 – DO. Try to avoid saying the same thing a couple of different ways. Make your point and move on. The examiner is looking for economy of language: each sentence is crammed with information; no idea or quote is ever repeated; essay is carefully structured into neat paragraphs; linking phrases are used to create flow from idea to idea and from paragraph to paragraph.
  1. Poem by poem analysis which doesn’t establish links between them – you are giving an overview of the poet’s work, showing how the poems fit together, analysing common themes or recurring techniques. Do not just write three mini essays on individual poems. Link them! Each paragraph should begin with a topic sentence. This topic sentence can be thematic, stylistic or tonal.

e.g. THEMATIC = “Boland explores historical events from a deeply personal and individual viewpoint”

e.g. STYLISTIC = “Eavan Boland makes wonderful use of contrast in many of her poems, to bring each issue she deals with into sharper focus”

e.g. TONAL = “Boland masterfully evokes the depth of human suffering in her poems”