Episode 8

Advertising

In Week 8, we were asked to develop a brand for a pair of sneakers. We then had to put together a 30 sec TV commercial and a bus stop poster to advertise our brand. I was in the winning team.

This is my favourite task so far and I was glad that Jadine was project manager as I really enjoy working with her. I played a big role in this task. I was responsible for story-boarding, co-editing and co-directing the TV commercial with Jadine, organising the actors, location, costumes, planning, helping with the poster and lyrics as well as creating the pitch for Jadine.

Tre was really moody during the whole task. I'm not sure what his problem was but he started to really get to everyone. Even Simon started getting affected by Tre's negative attitude. Tre was asked to put together the poster. I was very disappointed in Tre's work, especially considering he is a marketing consultant. I looked over his design and provided him with lots of feedback, including layout, font, colours and also putting the actual price on the poster. I knew SAS wanted us to focus on "shifting kit", and the price would be a key example of us delivering to his needs.

I think Tre was really frustrated as he felt he wasn’t being used to his full potential since he considered himself the marketing expert. The one thing Tre did contribute was the idea of donating a percentage of profits back to the street.

Overall I was really disappointed in Tre's contribution and attitude during this task. I was especially angry when I heard him say that he was 'leading from the shadows' - rubbish.

Simon was really frustrating on day one. We spent a lot of time explaining the difference between 'the big idea' and 'branding' to him. He kept wanting to focus on colours, logos etc. His lack of knowledge of basic marketing concepts became really evident and this caused us to waste a lot of time.

However, what Simon lacked in marketing knowledge, he made up for with his dance and voice-over skills. Tre was really jealous of Simon stealing the limelight and was really starting to bring poor Simon down. So I did my best to help Simon focus on the positive. I knew he was playing a key role in our project and I didn’t want to lose Simon's energy and enthusiasm. Simon and I have a great time together. He's clever, fun and witty - I especially liked his line outing me on national TV!

Jadine stumbled a bit in the pitch, but overall, she did us proud! It was quite emotional to see our poster at a bus stop - it felt awesome to see the fruit of all our hard work!

On the topic of the actors and why we didnt specifically cast dancers - we were given photos of the talent we were allowed to cast. We couldnt cast anyone else. We didnt have any information on the talent apart from their photos and we werent allowed to contact them either. So we organised the auditions based on our impressions of their photographs.

Some of you eagle-eyed fans would probably have realised that Tre didn’t actually join us at the treat. I feel this was due to a combination of the fact that the treat was alcohol related (ie, cultural incompatibility), his lingering moodiness and that he knew that Ghazal would not be coming back from the boardroom (Tre had been looking out for Ghazal like his little sister). During the past 8 weeks, I’ve gotten close to Ghazal as well on a personal level, so I am sad to see her go.

Lohit Kalburgi

Lohit Kalburgi