The end, what we did and what we learnt…

The purpose of this Project was to create a soft, affective, media communications campaign to celebrate the University of Warwick’s 50th Anniversary in 2015 on behalf of the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies basing the story in ‘each of our Warwick Stories.

To accomplish this challenge we were grouped in a team of 6 persons, so the first thing we needed to understand was which were the strengths, abilities and experience of each of the members so each of us we can have a role in the project. We found out we were a very versatile team, where most of us had work experience, therefore it was easier to organize the team.

After we assigned roles, we focused in what we needed to reach the main objective of the project. We decided we needed to focused in the following points:

• Who is our target audience and which other audience we should care about, ex. Staff, professors and vice-chancellor .
• How we are going to attract this audience
• How we are going to create a video that appeals to the necessities of our target audience.
• Which platforms we will use to broadcast the video and which strategy will support this video so this campaign could be successful.
• Which type of digital story telling we wanted to use, how we are going to make something emotional enough so we can engage the audience.

With these questions in mind, we decided the following things:

• Our target market would be millenials, people between 24-30 years because most of the students that attend to a master program are between these years.
• We also wanted to connect with alumni; we wanted to make a video that makes them remind what was to be in Warwick, and what it gave them. So they can share the video and become ambassadors of Warwick, spreading the word about how good it is.
• Since mllenials are very related with nostalgia , freedom, friendship, and discovery concepts, we decided that the best way to present it was reminiscing about our best days in university.
• Therefore, we chose to present six letters with each of our stories, this letters are written by us, 20 years after we left Warwick. Each of us write to each other to reconnect and tell us about our best memories about Warwick.
• Through this letters we talked about the most important things of Warwick and the Centre for cultural and policies studies as their international environment, sports life, career opportunities, friendship, experience, travel and the fact that this university challenge each student to question them selves and to find new ways to see the world.
• We also did a SWOT analysis, this helped us to see what we needed to take in count for our marketing strategy and also for our video to reinforce our strengths there.
• Our Digital Marketing strategy was based principally in a campaign that will start with Word of Mouth.
• We saw that for our target market it is a very difficult decision to decide to invest again in school, furthermore in some cases to leave their jobs. With these in mind, we found that the best person to tell you about how good is an university and how many options you can find after you graduate were alumni.
• To connect with this group of people, we needed to use different existence platform as: E-mentoring, Alumni mailing, Alumni facebook, Alumni twitter, Alumni ambassadors.
• The most important thing about our strategy would be ambassadors that were divided in official and current ambassadors.
• Official ambassadors should be form UK and others parts of the world. They will share the video wit other alumni and in their own social media. They also need to interact in university fairs with possible future students. The most important activities is to be in contact with future students, to tell them about career opportunities, what is to live in UK for international students and many other facts about Warwick.
• The current alumni network will be encouraged to share the video, and also invite them to talk about their own Warwick story through the hashtag #mywarwickstory and this could be through sharing photos, stories and videos.
• The most important thing about this strategy is to make this video viral, so it could be share through many different channels and Warwick could attract as many students as they want.

To conclude, we obtained many learnings about this project, one of the most important was to understand the concept and the application of digital story telling. To tell a good story it is necessary you now very well your audience and then to know everything about the product you are going to talk about. If you know this two things, you can linked them in a story which appeals to your audience and engage it so you can convince them and make them want your product because it is perfectly related to them.

Feedback

To evaluate our digital stories and proposal, we need a feedback form that is comprehensively designed to reflect the strengths and weaknesses of our project, meanwhile explicitly organised, making it easy for our audiences to understand. At the formative team presentation in week 10, we sent out a total of 24 feedback forms (19 students, 5 staffs), and got 23 copies back (19 students, 4 staffs).

The feedback form was separated into three sections. The first part is about the content and production of the story, the second part is for evaluation of our digital strategies, For questions in these two parts, most answers offer five ratings to choose, ranging from poor, average to good, as the example shown below.

The narration and production of the digital story are the most important compositions of our group work, and we have spent most of our time on it. In the first part of the feedback form, each question corresponds with our concerns in our production process.

Primarily, we wanted to test our big idea from three perspectives —the creativity of our idea (writing to each other via different media technologies to invoke a reminiscence of our Warwick memories and get a reunion at Dana’s 50th birthday), whether the story was informative (we recognised the differences in the amount of information conveyed in each story) and if we told our stories in a clear manner that both the content and the linkage of stories were comprehensible for the audiences.

Then, we wanted to make sure the quality and appropriateness of out selected photos, and the emotion and clearness of our voices. We had additional concern of the speed of our voices. We already found we have a lot scripts to finish in each 90 seconds and might be a little fast with our narration. However, considering we are doing letters, it seemed to be OK. We were not sure about this and expect to find out from the feedback.

In the second part of the form, we mostly wanted to find out whether our production would be reachable and spreadable among our audiences through our digital strategy. The third part is consisted by open questions with the expectation to collect further thoughts and advices from the audiences.

From the feedback we received after the presentation, we made following conclusions.

Things to improve:

• The biggest problem of our proposal came from the voices, the volume of the voice was not equal, some parts of the narration were not quite clear due to intonation and quite voice. The voices could be more engaging and consistent.
• The design of the slides should be considered that some slides carried too much text to follow.

The good parts:

• The selection of photos was good.
• Our research and analysis of Warwick essence and competitors were thought to be thorough and impressive.
• The idea of imagining our future selves was creative, the connection of stories was good, and the story itself was engaging.
• The choice of target audience — the Millennials.

Other comments relate to our concerns:

• One-third of the respondents thought the pace of the story was fast.
• The story as a whole is informative, though some stories are obviously more informative than others, the mixed worked well.
• Digital strategy was considered effective, some found the alumni focus quite interesting and effective.

Why choose digital media instead of traditional media

As media director, how to tell our plan and story is the first thing I need to take into account. At beginning, I considered three parts when receiving the task that are:

1. What are the best channels of communication in order to reach target audience?

2. How are we going to get our messages/story out?

3. How can we assess the success of the storytelling?

The first one is part of marketing campaign. The second one is the form of our storytelling. The third one is relevant to our feedback and reflection. We did not intend to use traditional media to market, the tell our story and to assess our success. There are several reasons:

1. It is not widespread enough to use traditional media such as newspaper and posters. Our target market is all international students aged 24-31 and the scope is international. It is difficult for us to market and diffuse story in the scope of the world. Therefore, using traditional media will be limited. Marketing in transnational corporations are more reliant on digital platforms which will be convenient and fast.

2. It might cost a lot to use traditional media platforms. As is known, television and newspaper charge a lot for the time and the layout. Therefore, it is not worthwhile to post information on the traditional media. Comparatively, it is more cost-effective to use digital media.

3. Using transmedia or digital media to tell story is more accessible. We try video, photos, music to make up the story so that when potential audience/student open Warwick related websites, they could see the video directly. It is more direct and convenient for them to have access the digital storytelling.

4. Digital media is more beneficial and helpful for collecting feedback. Once the story is uploaded, it is more simple to count the clicks rates, the playing times, the time of watching, and the comments of audience, their suggestions of the video. It will be easier to get the feedback from potential audience. Though this is not direct relationship between the applicants number and the digital storytelling, the statistics from admission and recruitment department still can reflect the improvement of target audience compared to previous year.

Therefore, taking all above factors into consideration, we choose digital media instead of traditional media.

Our digital strategy

Always bearing in mind our mission of connecting customers’ human wants and stories, we developed our story with the clue of writing letters to each other. We want to continue the ‘connection’ in our digital strategies both online and offline.

Based on our SWOT analysis of Warwick, we found one of the opportunities of the university is to build the alumni network, which is an important consideration of our target audience, meanwhile, also a source of threats from outside. We also found the university is working hard on building its alumni network, operating ‘ Warwick Alumni’ accounts on Facebook and Twitter, as well as an e-mentoring system ‘Ask Warwick Alumni’ on the university website, which can be linked to individual’s Linkedin profile. In addition, the university is encouraging alumni to share their stories within 75 words on the university website and facebook.

         

Our research inspired us the possibility of fitting our strategy into the university’s campaign. We recognised one of the most powerful tools in marketing is the word of mouth. In terms of choosing a University, changing their path and leaving their job, future students need to be sure about their decision, and their best reference is other former students with successful careers.

Hence, our best ambassadors to spread the word about Warwick are alumni, who have already lived the Warwick experience, and are perfectly placed to talk about Warwick. We decided to use the alumni network as a bridge to deliver our messages to our target audience, at the same time, assisting the university to expand its network.

First, we will post our stories on video websites such as Youtube (or other video sharing websites according to different accessibility of Youtube in different countries), and share the story through different existent platforms where established fan bases have already formed, including the university’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, and its alumni accounts on Facebook and Twitter. The Facebook and Twitter accounts of all the departments and university organisations, such as the Student Union, should be encouraged to share the link. The wording of the message and the video itself will be designed to encourage the audiences to share this video and talk about their own Warwick story in SNS’s through the hashtag #MyWarwickstory. This could be through sharing photos, stories and videos. The story will also goes to the university website.

Moreover, we will specifically use the e-mentoring, alumni mailing and alumni ambassadors to spread the video through different channels among alumni, encouraging them to share this video to make it viral, and write to people they met in Warwick to join the campaign and the alumni network. We need different types of ambassadors, current alumni network, and official ambassadors working for the university’s international offices around the world, who understand the most widely used social media in their countries. With more people talking about their Warwick experiences and more digital resources reachable on the Internet, the figure of the university will be more accessible to our target audience via searching engines or other media channels.

Apart from the online activities, we also found it useful to make interactions in universities fairs and offer point of reference for future students. Since sometimes people might felt overwhelmed by loads of information on the Internet, face to face communication could make the message more persuasive, as well as reminding our audiences ways of researching the university.

Competitor Analysis

We split our competitor analysis into two parts; firstly we identified two universities which compete with Warwick both internationally and in Britain, and listed the pull factors for these. Secondly we found two courses that compete with the ones offered in Warwick’s Centre for Cultural Policy Studies, and analysed how these universities sold themselves.

Thus, Imperial College London, and the University of Edinburgh were both found to be universities with international reputations that matched Warwick’s.

Imperial was easy enough to analyse; as well as its stellar academic reputation and ranking, it is in the centre of London, and therefore highly attractive for international students. Home students, however, were found to be more likely to be dubious of the costs of living in London as a student.

Edinburgh surprised home students as being one of the most highly regarded universities internationally, as it enjoys high but not exceptional rankings in the UK, yet has a huge reputation abroad. Strong networks of university promoters and alumni at university fairs abroad were found to cause this.

The two universities which offered departments or courses to compete with Warwick’s CCPS were the London School of Economics, and Kings College London. Obviously, both of these had the advantage of being in London to attract (particularly international) students. However, after this initial commonality, we found the two universities portrayed themselves very differently. From watching their promotional videos, reading their prospectuses, and researching popular cultural sources, it was clear that the LSE wanted to project an image in line with their reputation for academic excellence, seriousness and rigour. Thus, their communications were more informative than particularly engaging.

This contrasted greatly with KCL, which tailored its videos and prospectuses to show a wider picture of student life at Kings, and were friendlier and more approachable. They emphasised how much help they gave to international students in terms of helping them get visas and accommodation sorted out. They also stressed their connections with the communications industry as a selling point.

We completed a ‘brand essence’ for both these universities in order to compare them with what we had identified as Warwick’s:

Swot Analysis

As a part of our marketing research, we needed to analyse weaknesses and strengthens of Warwick. This was one of the most important parts of our research, since through this, we found out why students have chosen this University and which are the most important reasons of rejection. Although we already have picked our target market, we needed to understand which are the most attractive characteristics these types of students are looking for and to understand if Warwick has them or what they need to improve to obtain them.

These are our most interesting findings and it is explained through a SWOT analysis.

Strengths

• High-ranking
• Reputation of WBS, its MBA (raised to 25th in world)
• WMG (industry connections), practical courses
• Career-oriented, high employability
• Campus university – fosters a sense of community, countryside surroundings
• Offers a flexible and varied learning style

Weaknesses

• Lack of established history
• Unclear location (Warwick/Coventry)
• Some unclear department allocations / identifications
• Short of postgraduate students with working experience
• Large international population but lacks diversity

Opportunities

• Alumni network, still being built, ripe for being exploited more.
• World recognition – growing reputation
• Potential – we are young, only getting better.
• Willingness to be flexible (learning styles)

Threats

• Some faculties not as well linked to industry compared to other departments and our competitors
• US universities as competition – English speaking, often more highly ranked

One of our most important conclusions was that even Warwick has a great reputation it is not world known. It is recognised in some parts of the world as China and that is why the university has a big population of Chinese students, however there is a lack of nationality diversity, due to this deficiency of worldwide renown.

How does the short film appeal to the staff and the alumni?

In this blog post I will talk about how our curated short film appeals to the staff members and the alumni of the University of Warwick. In the process of script writing and photos shooting, we try very hard to include every aspect that could relate to the alumni. What’s more, we want to consider the feelings of all university staff member, be it the Vice Chancellor or a shuttle bus driver.

The Introduction Part:

Our stories start with Dana writing a letter to me after finding a group photo of the whole class 20 years ago. Catching up with friends in university and reminiscing about the old good days is what most graduates would do as time passes by. This is the first strategy we use to relate to our alumni.

Wu’s Part (Keywords: CCPS; campus)

Since our client would be the staff of the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies (CCPS), we try to attract their attention at the very beginning of the film. In my script I emphasize the help that CCPS offered during my application for a competitive scholarship.

Then I talk about the beautiful campus, which might be the first thing that comes into mind when people mention the university. Warwick is famous for the nearly 300 hectares of natural countryside with lakes, woods and carefully tended gardens. People who had ever studied here must have enjoyed the scenery as much as current students and teachers do.

Wen’s Part (Keyword: experience)

According to the statistics provided by Warwick’s website, about one-third of current students are from overseas. In Wen’s part she talks about her experience as an international student — trying out the genuine British food, making many foreign friends and learning firsthand. All of these are the shared memories of our overseas alumni.

Zhe’s Part (Keywords: international; teaching style; Christmas party)

Warwick is an international University with an international outlook. The academic staff here come from all over the world to do research and teach at the internationally renowned departments. In Zhe’s part she talks about the diverse cultural backgrounds of the students. It is easy for many members of the staff who are also from different countries to relate to.

What would students remember the most of a teacher after graduation? Maybe his/her teaching style. Zhe talks about her listening and speaking class teacher in the free in-sessional courses offered by the Centre for Applied Linguistics. She uses photos of him and sentences like these: “He was full of passion and humor” and “It was a quite versatile teaching style, and one I’ve never met in my former education.”

Many students might have the experience of taking part in a dinner party held by their warm-hearted teachers. Zhe talks about the fun we had during the traditional Christmas party in Sara’s house. The staff and the alumni would recall their own memories of similar events when watching this part.

Katie’s Part (Keyword: sport)

The role and importance of sport in students’ lives cannot be overstated. Katie talks about her sporting life as the president of the female hockey club. She describes in detail the feeling of being a part of a community, the connection with teammates who train and play together, as well as the joy after winning a game. Every alumnus who had ever been in an athletic club in Warwick would remember the same feeling with Katie.

Sharon’s Part (Keyword: career)

In Sharon’s script she images herself as a reporter at a TV station 20 years after graduation. She attributes a large part of her success to the support provided by the Careers and Skills department of Warwick. The career center helps her prepare for the job market, polishes her CV and even arranges mock interviews. Many of our alumni must have benefited from the service as Sharon does. As they become successful in their career life or even start their own business, an increasing number of our alumni would love to provide internships and job opportunities for current Warwick students.

Dana’s Part (Keywords: discovery)

Dana’s part serves as the conclusion as the six letters draw a perfect circle. She uses one word to describe her life at Warwick – “discovery”. Time has passed and the campus has been developed throughout 50 years. What we get from the university might be different. But “discovery” might be the key word for the university life of every Warwick student now and then, and even for those staff members. We discovered how to see the world through other’s eyes; we discovered the best of ourselves during the process of learning; we discovered a new life’s path which leads to a new world.

Digital Storytelling Case Study: Alibaba Roadshow Video

Alibaba, China’s e-commerce giant, released a video of its roadshow presentation before its IPO in New York in September 2014. The video gives prospective investors all the facts and numbers about the company and how it influences China’s retail infrastructure and the lives of ordinary Chinese consumers.

This is the video that inspired us to make a film of a similar structure. In this blog I will try to analyse the digital storytelling method of this video. I will point out what message Alibaba wants to send to investors and how it does the job.

The seven-minute video consists of one introduction, one conclusion and seven stories.

In the first part, Alibaba Group’s founder and Chairman Jack Ma gives a brief introduction of the history and the status quo of Alibaba. Jack ma stands in front of the camera and speaks directly to the audience with a sincere and confident look. He talks about the initial dream of the founders when they started their business 15 years ago, which remains the same till now. Then he leads the audience to “a journey around China, to see the real people and real stories that Alibaba have impact on them”.

The main body of the video is made up of stories of seven ordinary people living in different parts of China. Each of them has a theme which reflects different aspects of changes Alibaba brings to sellers and customers as well as the whole industry.

The theme of the first story is lifestyle, which is reflected through the narrative of a college girl living in Shanghai. Using Taobao and Tmall, the online shopping sites operated by Alibaba, becomes her lifestyle. She is the representative of the 60 million daily visitors who cannot live without Alibaba in their daily life. The second story is told by a logistics executive of a delivery services company. According to him, a single dispatch site here can handle up to 1 million packages per day, among which 85% are from Taobao and Tmall. We can easily tell the large scale of the e-commerce world created by Alibaba through the profound impact it has on the logistics industry. The next one is a story about a severely disabled female painter living in a small town. At first she knew very little about the internet and it was her customers who helped her open an online store to sell her paintings. We would not forget the touching words she said:”Taobao gave me hope. Without it, how would I sell my work in this little town? Who would know about me?” The fourth story is from the angle of a shop owner living in Yushu, a remote and isolated area in northwest China. His physical shop used to have only a limited number of local customers. But now with the help of Alibaba, it is open to the whole world. We are surprised to see that he even uses mobile communication applications to manage his online store. The fifth story is about a “Taobao village” in Zhejiang Province, where an association was set up voluntarily by local online sellers themselves. Among these passionate entrepreneurs there is an elderly stamp store owner. He is proud of that his store has zero bad review. And he shares the secret of his success: being honest. The sixth story is told by a working mother who uses Taobao to buy anything from clothes to grocery and household goods. By doing that, she and numerous working mothers could have more time and energy to play with their children. The last story is narrated by a young entrepreneur who opened his tea company with a start-up money of only RMB 1,200. Thanks to Alibaba’s well-developed platform, he could focus entirely on his products rather than retailing channels and technological problems.

In the conclusion part Jack Ma restates the mission of Alibaba, which is to ignite innovation, create jobs, benefit customers and help entrepreneurs fulfill their dreams.

The roadshow video is successful in every sense. It is touching and inspiring as well as informative. In the first and last part Jack Ma explicitly states where Alibaba stands right now and where it’s going. In the main part every story is carefully chosen and narrated so as to convey the exact meaning Alibaba wants to tell. The “heart and spirit” of Alibaba is not indoctrinated by their senior executives, but instilled through the words of ordinary people while explaining their everyday life. This is a really smart strategy, which we could use when we make our own film.

The Process of Shooting and Selecting Photos

As the art director of our media agency, I am in charge of the final appearance of our video, to be specific, taking and selecting photos. In this blogpost I will explain how I did it.

After we finished the first draft of our scripts, we tried to find some photos in our own albums to match with the scripts. For instance, when I talk about my working experience as a photojournalist, I use photos of me shooting with a DSLR camera. When Katie describes her as a sporty girl, she uses photos of playing hockey with team members in the morning field. This is really helpful when we mention our past experiences. Yet it falls short when we depict our current lives in the University of Warwick, which should be the most important part in the video.

So we made a list of the scenes we lack. First, we shot the scenes of us using progressive communication tools, which is the explicit line to connect the six stories, i.e. letter, email, text messaging, Facebook Chat, instant messaging and the futuristic technology. Second, I took a number of pictures at various locations on campus. For example, I used the photos of the student union to represent the versatile student life, students studying in the library to indicate their academic achievement, and Sharon browsing an employer’ guide to show the support offered by the Students Careers and Skills department. I also took scores of scenic photos to display the beauty of the campus.

In addition, since the video will be used as a promotional strategy not only for CCPS, but for the university as a whole, I decided to cover other academic departments in our video. But what is the most efficient and effective way to present all of them without saying a word? I thought of several solutions and then decided to take separate photos of their signs and logos. In the final video they are presented consecutively in a flash and then put together to create a combination picture to represent the variety of academic fields Warwick excels in.

The most interesting and creative part of our video would be Dana’s imaginary 50^th birthday party. As the six of us celebrated it with a birthday cake, I took a photo of the candles in the shape of the Arabic number “50”, which is a perfect match with the last scene I designed for the video — the number “50” consisting of all the photos above the logo of Warwick.

Video editing process and audio production

For this project, we used Sony Vegas as our video-editing tool. During the editing process, I not only recalled the memory of what I have learned in university, but also started to get familiar with some new skills.

There are two special points that we tried to present in our film:

1. The progress of message sending

From the hand-write letter, mobile message, instant message, social network platform to the future message sending technology, we use the development of technology as a time travel machine, and eventually, back to the original spirit of letter, SHARING, during last letter in the film.

2. 50 years old celebration

It is not just a story of our memory in Warwick, but also a celebration of Danae’s 50 years old birthday. The ‘50’ concept coincidentally connected the core topic of Warwick project and our own history of friendship. In the last part of the film, after receiving the message from Danae, six of us surprisingly reunite together again. In addition to showing communication without borders, this also presented that people can be together with no distance because of the globalization and fast development of technology.

Step1. Voiceover and music

In order to present the letter concept, we found that what was the most important in our film would be the feeling of sharing. Letter itself contains the expression of caring and the eagerness of contacting. Therefore, we tried to express the emotions through voiceover. At first, we chose to record it in the same space so that we could double check the quality for each other. But during the process of recording, we noticed some problems, such as the speed wasn’t easy to be control because of the time limitation. And it also wasn’t easy to express the emotion in voice as we expected. After watching the first cut and the presentation, we received many helpful suggestions about the performance of voiceover. Interesting voiceover makes film less redundant and raises the entertainingness.

For improve the sound performance, we changed to record the voice alone, and revised it several times. Afterward, we found that it would be much better to express the emotion if we cut off some lines, adjust the speed, and make some appropriate stop in the end of paragraphs.

One of the best part of our video is the music. The two soundtracks were made by Katie’s flatmate. Besides of the originality, the sound of guitar also functioned as comfort, which bring up and down of the emotional expression, and it was also the key element of connection among six stories.

In addition to combining the music and voiceover, we also attempted to present ‘the sound of digital technology progress’ in beginning of each one’s stories. The combination of the voiceover, music, and sound effect completed the sound performance of our video.

Step2. Links between six stories

‘The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.’ – Jean-Luc Godard

According to Godard’s quote, which is also the basic principle of film, I understand that videos are not just one and another photographs, but it is how a link between images connects with the true impressions and stories in human brain.

In the story of letters, we wanted to use the memory to tell a story of Warwick. The sequence of each stories presented ‘why Warwick’, ‘Warwick and personal life’, and ‘ what did Warwick give us after graduation’. Luckily, we had so many different kinds of resources for our video. For example, we have a professional photographer responsibly presented a lot of beautiful pictures on campus, and the past three years of Katie staying in Warwick also provided another special angle for the story.

According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, at the U.S. National Library of Medicine, the average attention span of a human being has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013 thanks to the social network. And another earlier study of TubeMogul in 2010 also showed that at the 30 second mark, we already lost a third of the audience and after a minute we lost more than half.

In order not to bore our audience, we found that the most appropriate performance was combining 5-6 photos per minutes in static and dynamic states. By moving the lens, and make some transitions for each stories, the audience will be more concentrated on the video.

An example of still pictures with voiceover：

Another example with dynamic camera lens makes the video more vivid.

There are lots of online self-learning materials of video editing. From this experience, I became more skilled in editing, and I realized the importance of patience and carefulness when experiencing the exercising of theory and practice. The infectivity of film conquers the audience sense perception and emotions, which is more powerful than other medium. Not to mention the importance of videos as a tool in digital communication. This project still has some spaces to be improved, what I learned the most was how to tell a story in limited duration, and a good concept can be more convincing and sharable with a good storytelling.