In the Spring of 2020, I assumed the role of Creative Faculty Advisor for Live Oak Communications, a student-led agency at Elon University. While the agency has a Faculty Advisor responsible for handling account-side activities, my focus lies in managing the creative aspects. As mandated, the students take the lead in directing the agency's operations. Each spring and fall semesters we welcome a fresh team and a new set of projects.
Our clientele consists of local small businesses, including a veterinary clinic, a diner, a casual swim & tennis club, a restaurant, and a non-profit organization catering to seniors. These clients engage with the agency by paying a retainer fee each semester to avail of our services.
Before my tenure began, the advertising for the dry cleaners in the previous semester looked like this:
MY FIRST SEMESTER...the students had no brand identity and created two ads for the client with totally different looks. They treated each project like it was a separate unique client and problem. The students were confident that they didn't need my help and that they knew exactly what they were doing. Until they realized they didn't. As one of them told me, "we don't know what we don't know." I thought that was really well put.
Second semester I began selling them on how a campaign could save them time, create a brand identity, and be a better launching pad to allow us to get to stronger work. I gave them a very generic, old-fashioned magazine-style template to begin with just to help generate concepts so they wouldn't spend so much time thinking about layout until they had ideas.
It started the ball rolling but it wasn't until the next semester that I saw them start to really grasp the idea. I also was able to find my art directors, my designers, and my illustrators and help each of them work on that type of work within the agency.
Next steps are to move past simple headline/subhead and explore how this translates to social media.
But in the meantime, they accomplished this...
And they accomplished THIS.
