NEWSPAPER MARKETING PROJECT • PRINCIPLES OF CORPORATE ADVERTISING
Three groups have been formed to assist in the marketing of the student newspaper:
• Marketing research group, which will conduct a focus group to learn what students think of the newspaper’s content (Allison, Danielle, Gerry, and Janice)
• Media kit group, which will put together demographics, rate card, and sample publication (Kristin, Ilaf)
• Radio/TV/youtube group, which will write a 30-second radio and TV/youtube ad (Egdanis, Olu, Ximena, Nari)
We spent most of our Wednesday, Nov. 5 class laying out the details for The Tower marketing project. Here are the details:
Marketing Research Focus Group
Focus group questions were discussed and written by the students. Kristin finalized the questions and e-mailed them to the instructor. The questions, which still need to be reviewed with The Tower adviser and staff, are:
1. Tell me about what you like to read.
2. Tell me about where you spend your free time on campus.
3. Tell me about the campus newspapers.
4. Introduce The Tower. What do you like? What don’t you like?
The date for the focus group will be December 3, and Allison Edgeley will be the focus group facilitator. We need to speak to the Tower adviser about booking a room appropriate for the focus group. Ximena will check with her department about possibly taping and we will also speak with Media/Film about getting cameras to record the session.
We discussed other audiences for The Tower, such as the graduate students and professors. For reasons of time limitations, we decided to focus on the undergraduate student body.
We will need to recruit approximately 10-12 students for the focus group. An incentive will be that we will serve pizza. Ilaf suggested that we work through the 1402 instructors to give an extra credit for attending the focus group. The instructor will contact Dr. Fitch about this, as he is the 1402 director. The 1402 students are ideal because they are from all disciplines and are not strictly communication students.
Media Kit
The kit will include a page that will not only show the sizes of the ads graphically, but the ads will be ideas for promotions and ad content that would be successful with the Kean student body.
There will be a demographics page that will explain the demographics of the Kean campus.
We hope The Tower office can obtain Kean University folders in which to insert the media kit.
Radio/TV/youtube:
We reviewed the Starbucks election day coffee video, which was posted on youtube. The instructor showed it as an example of a fairly simple-to-produce commercial. Such a commercial can be produced using stills from digital camera shoots and through use of such a program as Windows Moviemaker, which is found on both XP and Vista. In addition, we may incorporate the use of a video camera.
Next week the instructor will present to the class the benefits that are important to customers. Students need to understand the benefits so they can focus their copy on a benefit of importance to the Kean undergraduate students.
Corporate Advertising students will write the copy for the radio spot and we may turn it over to the student radio station staff to produce. The TV commercial could run on the campus’s closed circuit TV network. There is one spot on campus where video is looped and we would like this commercial inserted into that loop.
We have yet to discuss how we will use the video on youtube.
After the organizational work for the newspaper project, we discussed the election results.
