Strategy.

Our most recent brief at college has been on strategy. Quite frankly the whole subject seemed impossibly difficult but although I still know i'll never be a copywriter, learning the whole subject gave me more clarity on the meaning. The golden rule I found which helped me most was 'benefit, truth and insight'. When you get a brand or product you filter information under these headings. It just makes things much more clear and more feasible to create a strategy line. I now know what a strong strategy means, and they are generally the most simple.

After this brief we went onto an Art Direction and Copywriting module. During this I complied a research file studying and discovering famous Copywriters and Art Directors, looking at their backgrounds and work. This provided me with the knowledge to understand how they got into the advertising business, and to my surprise the majority had very unrelated backgrounds. For the brief, in teams of two we had to create two campaigns for Philips HD ready TV, one which was copy based and one which was visual communication. I found these very helpful in providing me with a great understanding of the vast difference, and how both ways can be effective in completely different ways. Personally I found the visual communication campaign a much more natural progression into creating ideas or concepts, whereas I found the copy based campaign a much more difficult task to create the idea. All in all, I was very pleased with the outcome, but me and my partner felt our strengths lay in separate areas. Mine in art direction and hers in copywriting.