Tag / Writing

by Kea

Upcoming Works

For the next few days, there will be several posts from students (and me), and we will be posting our trade-press release/journal observations on this blog. This assignment is designed to get students in the habit of reading trade magazines from their respective fields, and it helps students practice the strange and mysterious arts of the press release and the blog post.

Here is essentially what you can expect: students will observe/analyze an article about a marketing strategy or ad campaign and write a press release or blog post about it. There will be an emphasis on brevity, especially if it is a press release. It’s about conveying information effectively. The journal/blog post can be a bit longer. I encourage students to choose one or the other: the press release will give students much-needed practice on this valuable skill, but the blog post can help them exercise their writing muscles a bit.

This is, at heart, a rhetorics class, so we are most interested in understanding the different approaches to writing and how these approaches help us learn the most effective way to inform readers on a given product, service, or subject. The rhetorical conventions and strategies necessary for a press release are very different than what is needed for a blog post.

Oh, but what if the press release is the blog post?

Or, what if you are writing specific blog posts for specific reasons?

Each writing is accompanied by its own set of strategies. It will be fun to see what the students come up with.

Until next time,

-KRW

by drey3113

Me and Why You Should Be Interested

Hey guys! Darian here. I just wanted to tell you all a little bit about myself and give some insight on my life so far. I’m a musician that started in engineering, changed to public relations and ended up in advertising. Sounds interesting right?

My time at UF has certainly been anything but boring. I came in with the sole purpose of getting my degree in civil engineering because that’s what everyone expected of me. I picked up math and science subjects pretty well, so obviously I was “destined” to be a stem major right? Well after a little introspection and a couple of mental breakdowns I thought that maybe I could at least double major in something I love like music. I had played saxophone and trumpet in high school, so why not give it a shot here? Well apparently the music based scholarships were only available to oncoming freshmen and of course I discover this after my first semester. I did a little more research and decided that a minor in music was more manageable, fun and didn’t require me to sell an arm and a leg to cover the extra credits. So majoring in music was a bust, so what then? That was when I took my first class in the school of Journalism and Communication.

After taking a class in interpersonal communication I discovered that I love communicating. Learning the ins and outs of how and why people discuss things the way they do was fascinating and a career that involved constant interaction and presentation became my new obsession. This lead me to visit the PATH advising office and switch my major to public relations for my sophomore year. Funnily enough, I ended up switching again to advertising my third year because journalism based classes just weren’t my thing. Especially reporting. Just the thought of it makes me shudder. Anyways, this leads me to my life right now. I got to play in the marching band my freshman year, cried taking calculus, grew as a communicator in multimedia writing, and discovered what I really want in principle of advertising.

I’ll be posting interesting advertising trade posts that really make you scratch your head like how IHOP had one of the most successful campaigns in the past few years just from a name change. My goal is for both me and you to learn a thing or two about how taking risks and being bold can bring success. I’m excited for what the future holds, both with this class and in my career. Hopefully you’ll be looking at the next big advertising account executive in the next couple of years!

by Kea

What We Do

Content is king! I’m sure everyone has heard this little pearl more than once from a variety of sources. The idea is a staple of marketing firms and news organizations across the globe. Bill Gates famously penned an essay about it in the naught ages of the 1990s.

“Content,” he writes, “is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the internet, just as it was in broadcasting.” He was right.

In the early days of the internet, having something to write or promote promised you popularity and financial success. Now, not so much. In the age before social media, content was king; now, it has been demoted. We are living in a time where we are saturated with content, and not all of it is good.

Content can range from very informative to very ridiculous. In between that, you have multiple people peddling the same content over and over again. So, who, or rather what determines the winners and the losers?

Move over content; here comes the Queen: Branding. (Queen B!)

Branding makes all the difference. Think about it: How many lifestyle blogs are there? Why do some deserve our attention and others deserve, in the parlance of the day,  “to be paid dust?”

Branding.

How many ways can you make guacamole? Far fewer ways than there are blogs about it, but there are still people willing to read specific blogs that tell them how to do very generic things. It’s all about the spin.

This blog will not follow that trend. What we will do is observe how it’s done. We will look at various branding strategies and analyze, comment, and, in some cases, critique those strategies.

Since this is a class blog, it will feature posts from people working out what works about marketing, advertising, and branded content, and what doesn’t. We will take a critical approach to understanding the relation between product/idea and consumer.

Hopefully, what we all learn from working on this blog will help us to create and promote branded content that is both useful and beneficial.

Upwards and onwards!

-R